By Laura Raines

Pulse editor

May has become a special month for me. As Pulse editor, I’m fortunate to talk with many of you throughout the year as I search out and write stories about nurses and other allied health professionals. But in May — when The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and ajcjobs holds its Celebrating Nurses event and I get to interview winners of the Nursing Excellence Awards — I’m reminded again of what a remarkable and dedicated group you are.

Barry Williams, Special Pulse editor Laura Raines

Related

• Photos: 2010 ajcjopbs Nursing Excellence Awards
• Celebrating Nurses: Atlanta's 2010 nominees
• Celebrating Nurses main page
• Celebrating Nurses: The value of teamwork

This is the fifth year that our panel of independent judges has read through hundreds of applications to choose the 10 winners. The job is never easy; the total count was 332 nominations this year. Patients,
families and co-workers wrote
heartfelt tributes to special nurses who work in numerous specialties and settings.

In five years, we’ve all learned that excellence in nursing can take many forms. It can be a joke-telling, life-saving nurse in the emergency room, or a detective-inspired ICU nurse intent on finding the family of an unconscious Jane Doe patient.

It can be as dramatic as a critical care nurse, who manages a medical mission clinic in Haiti in her spare time, boarding a plane to help people five days after a devastating earthquake. Or as quiet and steady as a school nurse supervisor who cares for all of her “kids” in 34 public schools as if they were her own.

We congratulate this year’s winners: Vivian Abel, Atlanta Medical Center; Barbara Burk, Northeast Georgia Medical Center; Carolyn Chucci, Athens Regional Medical Center; Alice Debate, Southeastern Gynecologic Oncology at St. Joseph’s; Ray Hoover, St. Mary’s Hospital in Athens; Desiree McClendon, Newton Medical Center in Covington; Sheree Middleton, Piedmont Fayette Hospital in Fayetteville; Margaret Shaw, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and Visiting Nurse Hospice Atlanta; Sonya Smith, Piedmont Mountainside Hospital in Jasper; and Nancy Wood, Paulding County schools.

You can read more about these special people in Celebrating Nurses, a special section in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on May 2, and online at ajc.com/go/celebratingnurses .

During National Nurses Week (May 6-12), I hope that each of you will be celebrated and thanked for the many ways you enrich and save our lives. In my book, you’re all winners!

Contact us
: Do you have any story ideas for Pulse? Call 404-526-5664 or send e-mail to jbrieske@ajc.com.