Bridget Castillo, RN, a Staff Nurse at SignatureCare Emergency Center, Odessa, TX, received the award for going the extra mile in her service to patients and their families.

HOUSTON, TX – SignatureCare Emergency Center has awarded its 1st DAISY® Award For Extraordinary Nurses to Bridget Castillo, RN, a Staff Nurse at the company’s Odessa facility.

The company announced this week that Castillo was chosen for the award for giving extraordinary and compassionate care to her patients and families daily.

According to Rhonda Abbe, SignatureCare Emergency Center’s Director of Operations, SignatureCare’s purpose for giving the DAISY award For Extraordinary Nurses is to honor its emergency room nurses who go above and beyond to give extraordinary and compassionate care to patients and their families.

“These exemplary nurses go above and beyond the call of duty to care for our patients and their families when they come into our facilities. Bridget Castillo is just an exemplary nurse. Every day we see her show immense compassion to these patients and their families. We are so proud to give her this award. She deserves it,” Ms. Abbe said.

She added that even though nurses at all SignatureCare facilities throughout Texas provide great care to all patients when they come into the facilities, often, a nurse stands out.

“Our nurses do a great job caring for our patients, but sometimes, we witness extraordinary and compassionate care and service. That is what the DAISY® Award For Extraordinary Nurses is about. It is aimed at recognizing these extraordinary nurses who go above and beyond,” she added.

“Mark Barnes added that DAISY Award recognitions honor the super-human work nurses do for patients and families every day wherever they practice, in whatever role they serve, and throughout their careers – from nursing student through lifetime achievement in nursing.”

The DAISY Foundation’s mission is to express gratitude to nurses with recognition programs that celebrate the extraordinary, compassionate, and skillful care they provide patients and families. Over 5,400 healthcare facilities and schools of nursing in all 50 states in the United States and 33 other countries and territories give out the DAISY awards to their nurses.

The DAISY® Award For Extraordinary Nurses was created by Mark and Bonnie Barnes, who founded The DAISY Foundation in 1999 to honor nurses everywhere after seeing the extraordinary nursing care their son, J. Patrick Barnes, received while undergoing treatment for Idiopathic Thrombocytopenic Purpura (ITP) at the University of Washington Medical Center’s Seattle Cancer Care Alliance.

“Bonnie (Patrick’s stepmother) and I are so fortunate that we were able to spend the eight weeks of Patrick’s hospitalization with him. During those weeks, we experienced the best of Nursing.

We were there to witness his nurses’ clinical skills that dealt with his very complex medical situation, their fast thinking that saved his life more than once, and the nursing excellence that took them years to hone to the best of the profession.

“But frankly, as a patient’s family, we rather expected that Patrick would have great clinical care. What we did not expect was the kindness and compassion they showed Patrick and all of us in his family every day,” he said.

Mark Barnes added that the DAISY Award recognizes and honors the super-human work nurses do for patients and families every day wherever they practice, in whatever role they serve, and throughout their careers – from nursing student through lifetime achievement in nursing.

“We were awed by the way the nurses touched him and spoke with him, even when he was totally sedated. The way they informed and educated us eased our minds and their sensitivity to what we were going through made a great difference in our experience in the hospital. They truly helped us through the darkest hours of our lives, with soft voices of hope and strong, loving hugs that, to this day, we still feel.

“Just days after he died, we began talking about what we would do to help fill the giant hole in our hearts that Patrick’s passing had left. His wife, Tena, came up with the acronym, DAISY, standing for Diseases Attacking the Immune System. As Bonnie, Tena, and I discussed what to do in Patrick’s memory, we knew that first and foremost, we needed to say “Thank You” for the gifts nurses give their patients and families every day, just as we had experienced.

“We created The DAISY Award® for Extraordinary Nurses and piloted the program at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance at the University of Washington Medical Center. It was their nurses who cared for Patrick during the last weeks of his life. We wanted to give patients, families, and co-workers an easy way to express their gratitude for nurses who provide extraordinary compassionate care.

“And we wanted the program to honor nurses all year long – not only during Nurses Week. At the time we started the program, we could not have anticipated that The DAISY Award would come to be regarded as a strategic tool for nurse recruitment, retention, and resilience, adopted by healthcare facilities across the continuum of care all over the U.S. and beyond. The creative ways nurses and their organizations have brought The DAISY Award to life to honor compassionate care have inspired and delighted us,” he added.

Since its founding, The DAISY Award has honored over 189,000 nurses who provide above-and-beyond compassionate care to patients and families