The Nurses Who Made Headlines in 2022

Nurses are always striving to do what’s best for their patients in and out of work. The news is full of inspiring stories of providers going to extreme lengths to improve the health of their local community. Becker’s Hospital Review has put together a list of 61 nurses who made headlines in the last year. Here are some of the highlights:

Carla Hardy, an elementary school nurse in Georgia, saved a parent’s life after they started bleeding profusely during a visit to the school. Hardy grabbed a “Stop the Bleed Kit” and was able to stabilize the wound until the authorities arrived.

“I am very proud of the Stop the Bleed training provided by Piedmont Hospital in August,” said Nurse Hardy. “The parent was a little less anxious during the transfer to the hospital.”

In October, Linda Burnes Bolton, a chief nursing officer at Cedars-Sinai, received the 2022 Lifetime Legacy Award from the American Academy of Nursing for her leadership over her 50-year career with the hospital. 

Burnes Bolton first joined the facility in 1971 and held numerous positions over the years, including senior vice president and chief health equity officer, before retiring this year. She also served as president of the American Organization for Nursing Leadership, the National Black Nurses Association and the American Academy of Nursing.

Megan Pint, a nurse in the neonatal intensive care unit at M Health Fairview Masonic Children’s Hospital, went viral for the second year in a row for dressing up her tiny patients in homemade Halloween costumes.

Carla Sieber, a Florida nurse who volunteered to work in New York City at the height of the pandemic, returned to the Big Apple to compete in the New York City Marathon earlier this year.

“This is new. It’s scary. We see people dying,” Sieber said when the virus was ripping through New York. “So I felt like, you know, they didn’t need me here. And so I was like, this is perfect timing for me to go up there and help out.”

She worked 14 shifts over the span of just two and a half weeks in April of 2020. “The hospital I was in was actually built in the 1800s,” Sieber explained. “And they were getting ready to tear the building down that summer. So the building had been vacant. They hadn’t had patients in it. I believe it had been since like 2015, maybe 2017. It’s been a couple of years, completely empty. We had to, you know, find beds… Some of the areas we had patients in tarps in the hallways with zippers and are like ‘this is the best we can do.’ It’s a space we can put a person to try and help them so that’s what we did.”

She celebrated her participation in the marathon with an ode to the city where the crisis began.

“Just knowing you know what, what people went through out here, what the nurses went through up here, my own experience up here, and knowing all that and seeing how it’s bounced back up here, things are getting back to normal,” Sieber said.

Christina Barker, an RN in California, was praised over the summer for saving a swimmer’s life after they were bitten by a shark in Monterey Bay.

And Zakihia Moultrie, or Nurse Zee as she is called, was praised in August for starting Black Women in Medicine, an organization committed to increasing the number of black female providers in the field of healthcare.