The ECU Health Foundation recently recognized four team members at ECU Health Medical Center with 2024 Brody Awards, on behalf of the Brody families of Kinston and Greenville.
The Brody Awards, established in 1988, are given to team members who demonstrate unparalleled care, compassion, professionalism and commitment in all they do. The awards honor a registered nurse, an allied health professional, a clinical support team member and an Intensive Care Unit nurse.
The 2024 honorees are: Pam Hall, triage telephone nurse in Medical Oncology; Melinda Edwards, trauma registry supervisor; Kaitlin Lehrke, staff nurse II on the Surgical Intensive Care Unit; and Stacey Greenway, former director of Cardiovascular Disease Management.
Outstanding Nurse of the Year: Pam Hall
Pam Hall started her career as a nurse 42 years ago and joined then-Pitt County Memorial Hospital in 1991. She spent time on a number of units – pediatric intensive care, admissions testing, recovery and pre-operative – as well as the ECU Health SurgiCenter and ECU Health Pain Management before moving to her current role.
Today, as a triage telephone nurse, she connects with patients with cancer who call in for concerns or symptoms they are experiencing.
“Any of the patients that come to the hematology, oncology, surgical oncology clinics, they’re all given our phone numbers to call if they have any kind of problems, concerns, or if they’re having symptoms from chemotherapy, post-operative complications, anything like that, they call us,” Hall said. “Our calls are answered by nurses, and so we try our best to handle things for the nurses in the clinic so they can focus on the patients in clinic and anything that my co-worker and I can do to get an issue addressed or taken care of, we do.”
Whether it’s reaching out to the symptom management team, helping get patients to scheduling for an appointment or answering a quick question for a patient, Hall said she’s grateful to be someone patients and team members can count on when help is needed.
Hall said she enjoyed the interview process involved in the selection of Brody Award winners as it gave her an opportunity to reflect on the work she’s done.
“I’m just so very thankful to the Brody family that they thought I was worthy of this award. The team of people that interviewed me for this asked such thought-provoking questions and then I’m just humbled that they felt like I deserve this award,” Hall said. “I’m a telephone triage nurse and I told them in the interview, ‘I don’t do hands-on patient care anymore, so I really don’t feel like I am deserving of this award.’ I’m trying to look not too far in the distant future of when I retire and this was my transition. It’s been a struggle because I love hands-on patient care so the fact that they chose me was very humbling.”
Clinical Support Staff of the Year: Melinda Edwards
Melinda Edwards started working with trauma registry at then-Pitt County Memorial Hospital through a student job at East Carolina University in 1995 and joined the team full time 26 years ago.
Edwards said it’s been a joy to work in trauma registry over the years, thanks to a strong team and knowing her work makes a difference.
“The team is phenomenal, and I really do like the people I work with. They really have the best interest of the patient at heart. We’re not bedside, but you’ve got to have the data to be able to support any initiative,” Edwards said. “In addition to being a really great group from the surgeons and nurses to my team, it’s knowing that I am making an impact directly on patient care and for the injured patients of eastern North Carolina who come through our doors.”
As a Wayne County native, she said serving the region she has called home all her life is especially meaningful and she’s proud to help patients and families experiencing trauma.
While Edwards said she was humbled by the recognition as a Brody Award winner, she was excited to take the opportunity to highlight the important work her team does each day. The trauma registry team compiles data of all trauma events that require a hospital visit and helps the system make informed decisions on care pathways, prevention, improvements and more. While most would just associate trauma with direct patient care teams, she said the work behind the scenes is vitally important as well.
“There’s a whole other group of team members involved, and that’s trauma registry – they’re the engine to the car,” Edwards said. “I tell my team every opportunity I get, ‘What they do is incredibly important because we can’t move forward without data, we can’t do the research without data. The leadership team recognizes that, it’s about everybody in that division that’s helping move this system forward.”
ICU Nurse of the Year: Kaitlin Lehrke
Kaitlin Lehrke is a staff nurse on the SICU at ECU Health Medical Center and joined the team as a new graduate nurse from East Carolina University’s College of Nursing in June of 2020. She said it was an interesting experience to start her career as a nurse during the COVID-19 pandemic, but the team in trauma has helped her develop as a nurse.
Lehrke said the team is like a family to her, something that started when she first visited the SICU unit as a nursing student during her rotations.
“I remember walking in as a student absolutely terrified but I felt very welcomed by everyone that I met,” she said. “I felt welcomed in a way that was more than just, ‘We want you to be successful because we need you here.’ I felt welcomed because people genuinely wanted me to be successful. Everyone I came into contact with, my manager, coworkers, educators, there was no option but to be successful. I felt that everyone went out of their way to make sure, even as a student, I had the resources to be successful.”
While interviews for Brody Awards are meant to be in person, Lehrke had a virtual interview in October as she was heading to western North Carolina to assist with relief following Hurricane Helene. Originally the plan for her group was to do search and rescue but the area she visited needed more help with getting houses ready to be rebuilt.
“The church we partnered with had us at a house where the foundation had completely failed, so we were trying to get stuff out,” Lehrke said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. It felt like a movie of just like this town had just been ransacked, people were emptying out their houses, there were piles and piles of people’s livelihoods and family heirlooms on the side of the road, waiting to be picked up. It was tough to see.”
Lehrke said she returned to western North Carolina during Pitt County Schools’ spring break to continue supporting rebuilding and recovery efforts.
Allied Health Professional of the Year: Stacey Greenway
Over the years, Stacey Greenway has nominated others for Brody Awards but never considered that she may be nominated or selected for an award herself. She said the team she works alongside of and the progress of patients seen in cardiovascular and pulmonary rehabilitation has guided her work over the years.
“It was very exciting to learn I’d been selected, but it was more humbling than anything else. There are so many people in this health system that dedicate themselves to their work and to their patient care,” Greenway said. “It’s such an honor to be highlighted and I’m just proud of the work we get to do. We all work really hard, but it’s also fun to know you’re supporting patients in your community.”
During the interview process, Greenway said she was grateful for the opportunity to reflect on her time with ECU Health and the team she has supported along the way. Though she has since moved to a new role within the system, she received the award as director of cardiovascular disease management.
Over the last year, she said, cardiac rehab at ECU Health has made great strides to support patients and expand services offered in the region. She said her team examined how they can best educate patients in cardiac and pulmonary rehabilitation and how they can best help patients understand the rehabilitation process.
“That project was great and the whole team worked together to make that happen,” Greenway said. “Then we worked together with our partners in ECU Health Physicians to be able to open intensive cardiac rehab in Roanoke Rapids which has been unserved, not underserved, for quite some time in cardiac rehabilitation. It’s nice to be able to have that service there as a part of the trajectory of patient care.”
Congratulations to the 2024 Brody Award winners!