Nurses are the backbone of America’s healthcare system, yet they often work punishing hours for little recognition. The result is a shortage of qualified nurses threatening the quality of care across the county, but a campaign by the Simms/Mann Family Foundation aims to change that.
Through its “Off the Chart: Rewarding Nursing Greatness” campaign, 40 nurses across Los Angeles received a $10,000 award for excellence in their profession. The recipients were chosen from four greater Los Angeles hospitals: City of Hope, Keck Medicine of USC, UCLA Health and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. During a May 27 gala at the Luxe Sunset Hotel honoring the recipients, Dr. Victoria Mann Simms, co-founder and president of the foundation, said she hopes to set an example of how philanthropic causes can support nurses across different fields of medicine. Mann Simms said she was especially proud of the diversity in background and skillset represented by this year’s recipients.
“These are the people that we go to when we’re ill, when we’re happy, when we’re not feeling good, when we’re in crisis,” Mann Simms told the Courier. “And yet, we don’t value them the way that they deserve.”
When her father fell into an extended illness 30 years ago, Mann Simms saw firsthand how hard nurses worked to support her family and improve their quality of life. Then, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit four years ago, she witnessed nurses sacrifice their safety to work on the front lines of the public health crisis.
Despite these sacrifices, nurses were still not being properly thanked and are frequently overlooked by philanthropic institutions, Mann Simms said. For every dollar of healthcare philanthropy, only pennies go to the nurses, she added.
“I decided to try to figure out some way after COVID to appreciate them and let them know that … there are many people that do appreciate their work and understand the kind of work that they do,” Mann Simms said. “They’re not just people putting up pillows. They are scientifically and academically trained to care for the whole person.”
The 40 recipients chosen this year work at four hospitals across greater Los Angeles, with 10 coming from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Mann Simms said she was especially proud of the diversity in background and skill set represented by this year’s recipients.
Nico Olalia, a nurse who began her training in the Philippines, was the first person hired in Cedars-Sinai’s transition-to-hire program, in which nurses were hired from other kinds of practice to work in acute bedside care. Olalia exceeded with flying colors in the program, helping onboard and mentor new nurses and revamping her unit’s discharge checklist, an effort that she said won her the $10,000 award.
Patients often become anxious after being discharged from hospital, but the revamped checklist helped educate patients throughout their hospital stay, making them feel more empowered when it is time to go home, Olalia said.
For Lloyd Ryan Dimayuga, another Cedars-Sinai nurse, a professional journey grew from tragedy. He was inspired by his mother’s death to help other people, and after working as an EMT, he graduated from Cal State Los Angeles in 2018 and was hired by Cedars-Sinai shortly after.
Dimayuga quickly climbed the ranks. Like Olalia, he became a preceptor, a role in which he mentored and helped onboard new nurses, before moving into a supervisory position, overseeing about 20 nurses while caring for 54 patients, he said.
“It was learning to take care of many sick people as well as also to navigate the different personalities that a lot of the nurses” in the unit had, he said.
Dimayuga has continued to seek out new opportunities for growth and leadership, including by becoming a faculty member in the simulation center, where nurses learn how to respond to critical but rare medical emergencies, like cardiac arrest. But what cinched the award for Dimayuga was his experience working with a patient suffering from a rare blood disorder, who personally thanked Dimayuga for his care.
“I think just advocating for him and giving him that platform to speak and communicate with the medical team so that they could understand where he was coming from is kind of what led for him to say really nice things,” Dimayuga said.
Dimayuga’s nursing career has been full of similarly rewarding experiences, and with programs like the “Off the Chart” campaign, he hopes more nurses will receive the support they need to shine.
“Through ‘Off the Chart’ Nursing, I think [the Mann Simms Foundation] is shining a light on the solution to the nursing care crisis by showing and giving these nurses this unrestricted gift of appreciation for their knowledge and expertise,” Dimayuga said. “And I think it’s a great way for them to also inspire other philanthropic communities to invest in nursing and nursing care.”
