Nurse From Kings Park Receives Nurse Of Excellence Award

A Kings Park resident recently received the Nurse of Excellence Award during a ceremony hosted by the Nassa-Suffolk Hospital Council at the Woodbury Country Club last week.

Lisa Koshanksy, a Nurse Manager of Critical Care at St. Catherine of Siena Medical Center in Smithtown, beat out a total of 27 nominees for the award.

The nominees were selected from a field of about 500 nurses at hospitals and teaching institutions from across Long Island.

One nurse from each of the Hospital Council’s member hospitals was nominated for the award, which recognizes outstanding leadership and clinical practice. Deans of area nursing schools also submitted nominations recognizing nursing excellence in education and clinical practice.

“I love the profession of nursing," she said. "I am humbled to be in the company of such great nurses."

Koshansky says her lifelong motto and inspiration as a nurse has been “do no harm.”

Her drive for perfection has led the hospital’s critical care unit to remain free of central line-associated blood stream infection incidents since 2011 and without a ventilator-associated pneumonia case since 2009.

In addition, she has led her colleagues in the intensive care unit and cardiac care unit in restraint reduction, achieving a restraint reduction of 75.7 percent to 4.75 percent in the ICU in 2016 and a restraint reduction from 38.3 percent to 2.8 percent in the CCU.

"When you listen to what other nominees have accomplished, you tend to look at what you are not instead of what you are.”

“The most important person for patients in a hospital is the nurse,” Kenneth Roberts, chair of the Nassau-Suffolk Hospital Council and CEO of John T. Mather Memorial Hospitals said. “Nurse are there 24/7 taking care of patients.”

Congratulations to Lisa Koshanksy!

Pictured from left: Valerie Terzano MSN, RN, NEA-BC, Chair of the Nurse Excellence Sub-Committee and Senior Vice President of Nursing/Chief Nursing Officer, Winthrop-University Hospital; Mary Jane Finnegan MSN, Chief Nursing Officer, St. Catherine of Siena Medical Center; 2017 Nurse of Excellence Lisa Koshansky RN; Keisha Wisdom MA, RN, Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer, Brookhaven Memorial Hospital Medical Center