Leslie Anthony
November 2021
Leslie C
Anthony
,
BSN, RN
Atrium Health At Home Union
Monroe
,
NC
United States

 

 

 

Leslie's professionalism, skill set, intuition, and ability to adapt to challenging family dynamics put her at the apex of her profession.
This nurse deserves this award for so many reasons. She is such a committed teammate that is also caring, flexible, and always dependable. She has picked up call for fellow nurses too many times to count throughout the pandemic. She is there for the other nurses and also for her patients and caregivers. In terms of collaboration, this is with advanced practice clinicians such as a WCON and collaboration across the lines from home care to PCP in the community.

Recently, there was an extremely difficult situation with a patient at end-of-life. She showed her compassion, strong nursing skills, and willingness to grow and learn through every challenge. She also reached out and utilized resources like Culturevision to learn about the patient's culture and utilized hospice resources we were able to get from Union County Hospice to care for this patient at the very end.

Her compassionate care was not only noted by the team here, but also by the MD overseeing the care of the patient. The MD took the time to send the following to the director, "You are probably already aware of her, but I wanted to bring to your attention one of your nurses. She worked directly with me caring for one of my patients in his last months. He really should have been under hospice management, but the family was not ready, so this nurse assisted me in caring for him in a very intense medically and socially complex environment. She was adept at managing TPN, home palliative interventions, family dynamics, social and cultural discordance. She provided care that was easily in the top 1% of nurses I have worked with in my 35 years in medicine. Her in-person support and care in such a challenging situation, working the “loneliest job out there,” was a blessing for the family of this patient. He died at home under hospice management this last Saturday about 12 hours after my last in-home visit to the patient and his family. His family was very complimentary of the care provided and specifically called out “our Leslie” as a pillar of his care at home. Her professionalism, skill set, intuition, and ability to adapt to challenging family dynamics put her at the apex of her profession. I hope Healthy at Home realizes what you have in a colleague such as her. She would be a fantastic role model for new nurses or students. Her directed feedback, availability, problem-solving, and flexibility made a very challenging case manageable, and not the nightmare it could potentially have been.