UW Medical Foundation Shining STAR Award

The UW Medical Foundation presents the Shining STAR award to three employees for their exemplary service, dedication to patients and collegiality with fellow employees.

This award is given out annually and is based on an employee/physician's dedication to all four of the following values:

• Service: The employee/physician's innovation provides a service beneficial to the team, department, organization and/or the customer
• Teamwork: The employee/physician demonstrates that he/she is a team player and recognizes the importance of working together and communicating effectively to achieve shared goals
• Attitude: The employee/physician maintains a positive, upbeat attitude and promotes exceptional customer service
• Resourcefulness: The employee/physician demonstrates creative and unique ideas that lead to an improvement in workflow and efficiency, or positively influences customer service

Dennis was recognized for his "outside-the-box" thinking, his passion for teamwork, his fantastic attitude and the resourceful way he successfully shares his ideas with colleagues. Recently, Dennis was approached by his supervisor to coordinate a motivational training session for his team. Working in collaboration with a two co-workers, he not only helped develop a presentation, but he was the key facilitator of the training session. Dennis took his understanding of his job, along with a history of attending multiple organizational Customer Service Training sessions, and created a concept that he wanted to share. He was also asked to present his material to three additional teams in patient accounts, which he happily accepted.

Nancy is highly-respected within the Neurology program for her level of involvement and approach to healing. She has embraced learning the technical principals in order to help patients get the greatest benefit from their brain stimulators and seeks information from outside sources and shares that knowledge with patients, students, residents and colleagues. Nancy is the key developer, coordinator, and driving force behind the new Movement Disorders patient education program, "Moving Forward," and is frequently asked to speak at local Parkinson's disease and Tremor support groups.

Peter Laverty

General Laboratory

Pete exhibits dedication and commitment to patient care and teamwork. He puts others first, often focusing on ways to make the patient experience as pleasant and efficient as possible and using his innate sense of knowing what each patient needs for them to feel well cared for and comfortable. He continually looks for ways to make his co-workers' jobs easier, such as initiating improvements to the new employee training program, creating documents to help his co-workers work through challenging specimen issues, helping revise patient sign-in sheets and making suggestions to alleviate the safety concerns associate with the late closing shift.