Each year, Catholic Health Services seeks nominations from its staff for the Patrick J. Scollard Award for Leadership. This year’s winner of Catholic Health Services’ highest honor is Karen Allen, director of patient experience at St. Francis Hospital. Chosen from among colleagues across Catholic Health Services, she was recognized at the system’s 15th annual leadership conference.
“Through her deep commitment to understanding and meeting patients’ needs, Allen inspires others to achieve the goal of delivering safe, high-quality, patient-centered care,” said Catholic Health Services President and Chief Executive Officer Dr. Alan Guerci. “Her more than three decades with Catholic Health Services have shown her continued dedication to our patients and our mission.”
After 23 years as a nurse at Catholic Health Services’ Mercy Medical Center, Allen transferred to St. Francis, where she has been for almost a decade. Starting in St. Francis’s Post Anesthesia Care Unit, she led the staff to several positive clinical and patient satisfaction outcomes.
As a nurse manager in the Post Anesthesia Care Unit, she fostered effective communication between patients, physicians and staff, resulting in the Press Ganey Guardian of Excellence Award in 2015.
Earlier this year, the Post Anesthesia Care Unit staff earned the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses Silver-level Beacon Award for Excellence, a distinction given to only three other Post Anesthesia Care Units across the country.
St. Francis promoted Allen to director of patient experience, acting as a change agent, encouraging empathetic care and fostering the development of responsive skills. She focuses on safety and quality, using patient satisfaction data to drive change, introducing evidence-based improvements and best practices to empower the staff to achieve a positive patient experience.
Allen’s concern for others carries over into her personal life and is demonstrated by her commitment to volunteerism. Active in her parish, Allen is a Eucharistic minister and participates in a caregiver respite program for special needs children. She lives in Garden City with her husband, William. They have four children, Brian, Katie, Kelly and Lieutenant William T. Allen who is in the U.S. Army.
Both of the two leading finalists for the Patrick J. Scollard Award are from Catholic Health Services’ St. Catherine of Siena Medical Center — Barbara O’Neill and Mary Jane Finnegan. O’Neill is the first runner-up and Finnegan, the second.
O’Neill has dedicated her 40-year career to caring for those dealing with behavioral health issues. One of her greatest strengths is her ability to teach others the intricacies of caring for this patient group. For more than 10 years, she has been the driving force behind St. Catherine’s Crisis Prevention Institute Program for nonviolence training. Under her direction, this program was expanded to include all new nursing staff. In addition, O’Neill actively participates in Catholic Health Services’ Central Intake Department developed for psychiatry to ensure that patients expeditiously enter a place of healing specific to their needs.
O’Neill lives in Lake Ronkonkoma with Gaspare and their children, Brian, Dina, Michael and Charlotte.
The other finalist for this notable honor, St. Catherine’s Chief Nursing Officer Mary Jane Finnegan, joined the hospital in 2000 as the director of the emergency and psychiatry departments. Recognizing an effective leader, the hospital named her director of the intensive care and cardiac care units, too, before promoting her to Chief Nursing Officer.
Finnegan’s efforts contributed to St. Catherine becoming a New York State-recognized stroke center. After she presented an abstract at the International Stroke Conference, hospitals from across the U.S. contacted the medical center for direction on how to eliminate poor patient outcomes related to hospital-acquired pneumonia in stroke patients.
Finnegan earned state recognition for her work with EMS, thanks to her efforts to improve pre-hospital arrival communication, reducing door-to-needle time for administration of thrombolytic therapy and improving patient outcomes. This achievement led to St. Catherine winning the Healthcare Association of New York State Pinnacle Award for Quality & Patient Safety in 2017.
Finnegan lives in Ronkonkoma.
