Clay County Medical Center

Orange Park Medical Center nurses nominated for 'Celebration' honors

Three Clay County nurses are among 42 North Florida nominees for awards at an upcoming Everbank Field event to recognize the nursing profession.

"A Celebration of Nurses" will be held at 6 p.m. Thursday, July 21, with free food, drinks and live entertainment for nursing educators, administrators and practicing nurses. Three awards will be presented; the event was organized by HealthSource Magazine.

The Spirit Award will be given to someone who is new to the nursing field and exemplifies spirit in nursing; the Inspiration Award, to someone who has been in the field for several years and works "in the trenches," helping people and inspiring others; and the Legacy Award, to someone who has dedicated her life to the field and "has changed the landscape of the community for the better," according to a news release.

Area hospitals and healthcare facilities and the general public made the nominations. Here are the Clay nominees, all of whom work at Orange Park Medical Center.

- Amanda Tomlinson, 23, is a registered critical care nurse nominated for the Spirit Award. Her days range from encouraging and cheering a patient on for trying to breathe without a ventilator to giving medication to a stroke patient to sitting by a dying patient's side when family can't be there.

"I love the bonds that I make with patients, physicians and that I have the skills and tools to make a difference in the lives of people," she said. "There is no greater gratification than taking equipment out of a patient's room because the patient can survive without it.

"There are hard days too — when I cry in a supply room — but on those days you remember the good days and all of the good that you do," she said.

"I look at my patients and think that could be my brother, my mother, my father and that is what gets me choked up. I put myself where that family is. ... Nursing is trying to take care of that family."

- Gail Swearingen, 56, is a surgical services registered nurse nominated for the Inspiration Award. She was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at age 5, at a time when that diagnosis required lengthy hospital stays. The nurses who cared for her as a child inspired her to pursue nursing as a career.

"I do not remember ever having a negative experience in the hospital," she said in the release. "I was so impressed with the care that they took with me that nursing became a natural thing for me because I was so comfortable with nurses and the medical community.

Medical Center Protects Critical Business Applications While ...

Around 700GB

Rocky Russell and all his IT staff at Pattie A. Clay Regional Medical Center knew that the backup software they’d been using for over seven years wasn’t working for them. As the Senior Network Engineer at Pattie A. Clay, Russell and his team struggled night-after-night with the ever-encroaching backup window and the potential danger of losing up to 23 hours of work if something went wrong.

“We were using Backup Exec,” says Russell, “and we were only able to do incremental backups each evening which were taking up to eight hours to complete. This meant that if something went wrong, we’d lose a full day’s work, plus hours to get back up and running.”

Russell and his team found that the Center had more and more network traffic, in conjunction with longer and longer backups. And as the backup window increased, so did Russell’s concern that at any moment, one of the servers would fail and the medical center would be left without the backup data they needed. “We have a couple of absolutely critical servers that I worried about,” says Russell. “One is Exchange—if we lost this, it would be horrible. All the business communication is through email. Then we have our folder redirection server. If this failed, there would not only be the possibility of a loss of a full day’s work, but also an additional 12 hours to recover. On our SQL servers we’ve got the McKesson suite that has materials management, financials, operating room suite documentation, supplies, our intranet, and our document management servers with patient documentation and billing records. If we experienced a total loss of one of the critical servers, we’d be easily looking at a loss of 24 hours of data with up to 12 hours to recover.”

This scenario just wasn’t working for Russell, but he and his team found themselves going along with the status quo since they’d already paid for their current software. They got by hoping, with fingers crossed, that nothing would go wrong. That is, until the day Russell received communication from AppAssure asking if he was happy with his backups. “Frankly,” says Russell, “we weren’t.”

“I went to my manager and said, ‘Look, this isn’t working,’” explains Russell. “I told her, ‘The issue really is recovery.’ She and I both knew that what we had wasn’t the best in the world so we decided to present our case to management.”

Russell laid out the issues both in terms of numbers and in terms of vulnerability that the medical center was facing. While the numbers were impressive in terms of cost savings, it was the vulnerability of the business infrastructure that made the sale. Just looking at a failure of the Exchange and folder redirect server, the medical center stood to lose a full day’s worth of data, plus at least 12 hours for recovery. These were unacceptable RTO and RPO points for the center. “My thought still is on the selling point that we could reduce our data loss potential from 36 hours to less than one hour on our critical servers,” says Russell. “This is what made the center’s management realize that this is it—Replay is what we needed.

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