Jimmy is the kind of person whose excellence is most clearly seen in how he fosters excellence in others. Jimmy is incredibly adept at supporting the nurses on his team to be the best versions of themselves, both individually and as a group. He has a true gift for recognizing everyone’s unique potential and supporting them to rise to it. Instead of telling people what to do, he engages with them to find solutions and opportunities together. Managing in this collaborative way is harder than a top-down approach, but the results speak for themselves: His unit recently achieved gold level status by AACN’s Beacon Award for Excellence, the highest designation signifying a supportive healthy work environment with exceptional patient outcomes.

Jimmy is relentless in pursuing improvements: He has presented his initiatives at national conferences many times in the last several years. By every metric—patient experience, patient outcome, low turnover—Jimmy has turned his unit, which cares for people in heart failure, into a phenomenon.

Jimmy has accomplished this by facing challenges head-on: By implementing a mobility project, he reduced falls on his unit by 84 percent. His patient population is at high risk for hospital-acquired infections—despite this he has led his unit to achieve over a year without a central-line associated bloodstream infection. Just as important, the nurses on his team have strong retention with nurse turnover to be an astonishing low rate of 2.6% year to date.  

There are no shortcuts to these kinds of dramatic improvements. Jimmy has gotten there by engaging the team, encouraging creative ideas, and then implementing changes that benefit both nurses and patients. Just one example of this is the new grad/new hire nursing support group that he established. It is a supportive, safe way for new nurses to share their experiences, discuss challenges and offer feedback—which, in turn, makes even more improvements possible.