McLeod Health is honored to announce six McLeod Registered Nurses (RN) were selected to receive the 2016 Palmetto Gold Award. These nurses represent McLeod Loris and McLeod Seacoast. They join the ranks of the 137 previous McLeod Nurses who have received this outstanding award.

The six nurses who received the 2016 Palmetto Gold recognition include: Carole Bailey, Nurse Director; Brandy Lanier, Nurse Director; Sharon Simmons, PACU/Surgical Director; Kristin Norris, Emergency Department RN; Meagan Barnes, Inpatient RN and Kim McCracken, Occupational
Health RN.

The Palmetto Gold Award is a program that was started by various nursing organizations throughout South Carolina as a platform to recognize nursing, and support nursing education with scholarship funds.

Each year, employers from across a wide variety of South Carolina health care settings nominate outstanding nurses from their organizations to be considered as one of the 100 nurses honored with this prestigious award. The nominators are asked to provide evidence of how the nominee demonstrated excellence to the profession by addressing the following criteria. Those areas include: promoting and advancing of the profession of nursing; displaying of caring and commitment to patients, families, and colleagues and demonstrating leadership by assisting others to grow and develop.

This is a competitive process and usually several hundred nominations are submitted with only 100 being selected. Each year the competition for the Palmetto Gold Nurse Recognition Program is becoming more stringent as the number of nominations increases. To select the 100 RNs, a team of six nurses from across the state participate in a blind review process. The nominees are not referred to by name or place of employment on the
nomination sections seen by the judges so they are unaware of who they are or for which institution they work.

“Working with McLeod Loris Seacoast allows us to see the great patient outcomes that result from our excellent nursing staff. Our greatest resource is the hands of our employees. As the Palmetto Gold Award is presented to the top one hundred nurses in the state, it is with great honor to recognize: Carole Bailey, Brandy Lanier, Sharon Simmons, Kristin Norris, Meagan Barnes and Kim McCracken. All of these nurses are local nurses who have displayed excellent skills, role models for the nursing profession and are leaders in our organization,” states Amanda Mills, Associate Vice President of Nursing. “They all display the values of our organization in treating each person as an individual, providing compassionate care with the highest standard of quality in providing services to our patients and community.”

In 2008, the Renatta Loquist Graduate Nursing Scholarship was created to honor Mrs. Loquist, a member of the original Palmetto Gold committee
and a leader in nursing in our state. This scholarship is for $2,000 and has been awarded each year since. Since its inception, Palmetto Gold has awarded over $300,000 in nursing scholarships.