Celebrating Our President’s Excellence Awards

A couple of weeks ago we celebrated a very special event at Covenant Health: our annual presentation of the President’s Excellence Awards. These awards recognize outstanding individual employees and team projects that have improved patient care and lowered operational costs. We focus on performance that demonstrates Covenant Health’s Pledge of Excellence: putting patients first, excellence in everything we do, and making Covenant Health the first and best choice in our communities.

The President’s Excellence Awards celebration is a gala luncheon, and this year more than 300 people attended, including front-line employees, managers and directors, physicians, senior leaders, executives and Covenant Health board members.

Here’s a quick recap of the awards:

Suzanne Mickey, director of clinical operations at Morristown-Hamblen Healthcare System, received the 2018 President’s Excellence – Buscetta Leadership Award. She was selected from among 12 finalists who were nominated as outstanding managers or directors at Covenant Health.

Ten individuals received President’s Excellence Awards for Individual Achievement in recognition of their exemplary performance in their day-to-day responsibilities:

Laura Daugherty, RN, Methodist Medical Center

Don Day, Jr., RN, Roane Medical Center

Dillon Elliott, DPh, Fort Sanders Regional Medical Center

Jennifer Galloway, PT, Parkwest Therapy Center

Natalie Garcia, RN, Fort Loudoun Medical Center

Robbie Haley, LeConte Medical Center

Donna Ramsey, RN, Covenant HomeCare

Robert Roebuck, Patricia Neal Rehabilitation Center

Tonya Smith, RN, Morristown-Hamblen Healthcare System

George Tolbert, Peninsula Outpatient Services  

More than 40 teams throughout our system developed and implemented projects to improve outcomes and support our Pledge of Excellence. Judges representing community healthcare, education and quality improvement organizations helped us select five collaborative projects for team awards, along with additional project awards for Community Impact, Innovation, Improvement and Sustainability.

The President’s Award, Covenant Health’s top award, was given to a system-wide project team for excellence in preventing Clostridium Difficile infections at Covenant Health hospitals. C-Diff prevention is a focus of hospitals nationwide. Covenant Health hospitals perform significantly better than national hospital infection rates by identifying at-risk patients, implementing standardized testing, appropriate use of antibiotics, and ongoing staff education for infection prevention. This team’s accomplishments are impressive in an ongoing initiative that is essential to safe patient care.  

As you can imagine, I’m very proud of the award recipients and their significant accomplishments in improving patient care and health system operations. The President’s Excellence Awards are a wonderful way to recognize and celebrate these achievements. I’m also very proud of – and thankful for – our 10,000+ employees who demonstrate our Pledge of Excellence every day throughout Covenant Health.   

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