Helping Family Members with Difficult End-of-Life Decisions
Teresa Radford is a Clinician II on 3 West who has worked at UVA for more than 20 years. She’s been described as a team player and has been known to step in and help out when needed.
Teresa doesn’t shy away from difficult conversations, and she understands that team members need to talk about situations at the unit level. To that end, she began holding ‘moral distress’ meetings on 3 West to help staff learn how to cope with difficult situations.
These are just a few of the reasons why team member Carol Jackson nominated Teresa for a DAISY Award, which she received in October. Carol writes:
Teresa gets really involved as far as researching information that pertains to the patient and getting appropriate help when vastly needed.
Our unit was assigned a long-term patient that came with family dynamic issues, difficult progression of care, and many different psycho-social difficulties that took any ‘typical’ hospital care above and beyond. She spent a lot of time with this patient and her family until the patient eventually passed away.
Teresa spent many hours, cried many tears, and gave many hugs to this patient’s family and the physicians and staff that took care of her as well. With her expertise in palliative care, Teresa was able to help the family with difficult end-of-life decisions. This all led to the patient’s complete comfort at the end of life, and a new and deep understanding with staff, patients and family members.
If you see Teresa, please join us in congratulating her for this well-deserved recognition!
About the DAISY Awards
The DAISY Foundation was founded by the family of J. Patrick Barnes, who died at age 33 of complications from Idiopathic Thrombocytopenic Purpura (ITP). Barnes’ family is deeply grateful for kindness of his nurses and the compassionate care he received during his illness, and they established the DAISY Awards as a way to say “thank you” to nurses all across the country.