Dr. Helen K. Mussellem Award

Over the past 18 years working as a Registered Nurse, I still find myself truly blessed to have a career that I love and promote everyday.  Why did I become a nurse? Early on in my childhood, I always felt the need to help others, and I was drawn to the healthcare system. Working as a nurse has allowed me to utilize not only my compassion skills but also my critical thinking and teamwork skills to provide safe quality care to every patient I serve. My true love has become perioperative nursing where I have been privileged to network with other great operating room nurses coast to coast and even internationally on volunteer medical missions.  Perioperative nursing has allowed me to enhance my teamwork skills working with the interdisciplinary team providing new innovative surgical techniques to the changing demographics in our healthcare system.  

Florence Nightingale is quoted saying “Let us never consider ourselves finished nurses…we must be learning all of our lives”.  This philosophy has been guiding me as I embark on my journey to obtaining a Master of Nursing (MN) degree. My dream is to further enhance the perioperative profession by working with university nursing programs to incorporate more perioperative education into the undergraduate curriculum to promote the specialty of perioperative nursing. I also hope to use my MN degree to do more perioperative nursing research to further enhance the quality-of-care patients receive during their surgical journey.