One of McLeod Health Clarendon's longest serving certified nurse midwives who will be recognized this month with a Palmetto Gold Award.
Tom Chappell will receive the award April 22 at the 16th annual Palmetto Gold Gala in Columbia. He is one of 12 nurses in the McLeod Health system who will be recognized there.
"They join the ranks of the 155 previous McLeod nurses who have received this outstanding award," according to a release from McLeod Health Clarendon.
The Palmetto Gold Award was founded in May 2002 by a coalition of nurse leaders representing major healthcare organizations throughout South Carolina. Those leaders wanted a way to annually "showcase the valuable contributions nurses make to patient care in our state and to raise funds to provide scholarships for registered nursing students," reads the Palmetto Gold program website. "The gala proved to be a huge success (in its first year) and the proceeds were sufficient to provide a $1,000 scholarship to each registered nursing program in the state."
Award recipients are selected through an annual nomination and selection process from throughout the state and in a variety of practice settings. One-hundred nurses are ultimately selected annually, and more than 1,400 nurses have been honored thus far with the award.
"Each year, employers from across a wide variety of South Carolina health care settings nominate outstanding nurses from their organizations to be considered as one of the 100 nurses honored with this prestigious award," said McLeod Health Clarendon Women and Infant Services Director Debi Love Ballard. "The nominators are asked to provide evidence of how the nominee demonstrated excellence to the profession by addressing the following criteria: promoting and advancing of the profession of nursing; displaying of caring and commitment to patients, families, and colleagues and demonstrating leadership by assisting others to grow and develop."
Typically, Ballard said, several hundred nominations are submitted, and only the Top 100 are selected.
"Each year, the competition for the Palmetto Gold Nurse Recognition Program is becoming more stringent as the number of nominations increases," she said. "To select the 100 RNs, a team of six nurses from across the state participate in a blind review process. The nominees are not referred to by name or place of employment on the nomination sections seen by the judges so they are unaware of who they are or for which institution they work."
Ballard herself nominated Chappell, who has served as a nurse midwife for 20 years.
“(Tom) is a huge asset to his profession,” said Ballard. “His service extends locally to the members of his church where he is a Deacon, to his community as a speaker for women’s health issues and globally as a regular volunteer for medical mission trips to Moldova. We congratulate Tom for being recognized as a Palmetto Gold Recipient.”
Proceeds from April's gala serve the second purpose of the program, which is to support the future of nursing through $1,000 scholarships to each registered nursing undergraduate program in the state. An additional $2,000 scholarship is named after founding Palmetto Gold Committee member Renatta Loquist for one graduate nursing program in the state.
"Since its inception, the program has provided more than $300,000 scholarships to date," Ballard said.
