I have known Tamara Sullivan RN for two years during my time as an inpatient psychiatrist here at Swedish Edmonds. I have worked at several hospitals, with hundreds of nurses, and many dozens of nurse managers. Tamara is unquestionably the most compassionate, patient-centered nurse that I have ever worked with. Psychiatric nursing can be particularly challenging, since many of our patients can be provocative and poor advocates for themselves, including patients with borderline, narcissistic, or antisocial personality disorder, substance use disorder, severe psychosis, and agitation, or severe history of assault. Tamara treats all patients, from all backgrounds, and all walks of life, with equal compassion and dedication, and unfailing dignity. She personally lives up to the highest standards of nursing excellence and inspires her staff to do likewise, and I have never seen her compromise her values or the hospital's values or compromise her quality of care. She cares deeply for her staff as well and has elevated the safety in the unit by developing a tracking board for assaults and adverse events, initiating and spearheading a project to provide the staff safety push buttons to wear on the unit, and she enthusiastically participates in safety analysis of adverse events on the unit.

Please allow me to share with you a short story about Tamara to illustrate her compassion. A patient with a particularly challenging set of psychiatric conditions has been in our psychiatric unit for almost a year. His conditions are such that he has been assaultive and required seclusion or restraints many dozens of times. The patient can also be verbally and emotionally abusive, particularly to nursing, and highly attention-seeking and disruptive as well. Many nurses and staff working with this patient have hit their limits as caregivers and had their moments of frustration and breakdown of empathy (though never professionally compromising their care). Not Tamara. Tamara has been consistently excellent, and not only epitomized the Swedish standards for nursing excellence but also exceeded them in her compassion and generosity.

This particular patient has spent the last two years continuously in various hospitals, and on his birthday recently Tamara went out of her way to help provide the patient some degree of comfort, some degree of caring, by coming in on her day off on a holiday schedule to deliver him some food from a private restaurant. I was shocked. Tamara did this personally and did not delegate this to staff working that day. When I saw her and expressed surprise that she came in to take care of this personally, she was surprised, saying she only lived a short while away. What Tamara does not understand is that most nurses would not come in on their day off to do this, or they would consider such action an imposition.

With Tamara, caring deeply for patients is a privilege, and comes as naturally as drawing breath. In short, Tamara is the standard of caring by which I measure myself by as a clinician. It has been inspirational and a privilege to work with Tamara, she is a true DAISY Nurse Leader.