Jeanne Weiland, MSN, APRN, CNP, wins Carol McKenzie Award
Jeanne Weiland, MSN, APRN, CNP, a nurse practitioner in the Cystic Fibrosis (CF) Center at Cincinnati Children’s has been named the 2017 winner of the Carol McKenzie Award for Excellence in Advanced Practice Nursing.
Hailed by her colleagues as “the glue that fosters close teamwork among nurses, social workers, dietitians, psychologists and physicians and connects them to family needs,” Weiland received multiple nominations for the honor.
Says Tom Boat, MD, director of CFWELL and former chair of pediatrics, “I have tremendous respect and admiration for Jeanne’s contributions. She is key in the advanced data collection system that has become the benchmark for all centers in the national CF network. Her role in these efforts is in large part responsible for the top-10 ranking of Cincinnati Children’s CF Care Program in most categories among all CF centers.”
Rhonda Szczesniak, PhD, associate professor, Pulmonary Medicine, agrees and adds, “Jeanne is involved in basically every CF quality improvement project in the division. She knows how to lead and inspire the teams to work with her to solve problems and improve processes.”
One of those processes is about how to handle patients who are newly diagnosed. Says Szczesniak, “Jeanne is the perfect person to make the initial call to families who may be receiving not such good news because she is so comforting and reassuring when explaining this lifelong chronic illness. Not too long after I started here, she returned a call to a new diagnosis family who had a question, and they only wanted to speak to her. She was on vacation at the time, but she told me that sometimes you have to interrupt your vacation for a minute – families never get a vacation from CF.”
Weiland realized early on in her career that she wanted to work with patients with CF. She was originally hired to work in the adolescent unit led by head nurse Jo Harris and medical director, Jerry Rauh, MD.
“It was a perfect fit, and I instantly fell in love with the kids with CF who have incredible courage, determination and heart,” she says. “I worked nights so I got to spend quiet time with them as they went to sleep in their mist tents. Care of patients with CF has changed since then, but caring about the patients remains the same, and it continues to be a privilege and a joy.”
Weiland was selected from a field of 14 nominees for the Carol McKenzie Award. She acknowledged them in her acceptance speech, saying, “Congratulations to all the wonderful nurse practitioners in this group today who deserve to be standing up here more than I. We are so fortunate to work in an institution that recognizes and support the incredible knowledge, skill and caring that nurse practitioners bring to all that we do.”
