Hall of Honor Celebrates Outstanding Emergency Nurses

ENA’s Hall of Honor Reception on Oct. 2 recognized recipients of the ENA Annual Achievement Awards, Lantern Awards, Foundation Awards and other honors. In the first such reception held in person in three years, ENA leaders read the recipients’ names to rounds of applause.

Earlier in the day, ENA held a separate reception for an in-person acknowledgement of members who received awards during the pandemic in 2020 and 2021. 

“ENA certainly has many remarkable members, and the recipients we’re honoring tonight have done an incredible job in so many ways,” ENA President Jennifer Schmitz said at the 2022 awards event.

During the ceremony, Michael Moon received the ENA Lifetime Achievement Award, which honors an individual whose career achievements reflect dedicated service, accomplishments and contributions to emergency nursing that will impact the field beyond the recipient’s lifetime.

“Winning this award is a real surprise because you do (this work) because you’re passionate about it,” said Moon, a former ENA board member and a Fellow in the Academy of Emergency Nursing. He is currently a professor at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas. As an ENA member since 1988, he said it was a surreal feeling for him to be recognized for his substantially accomplished and diverse body of work like his colleagues before him.

“You don’t really think about that,” Moon continued. “That’s for the people who went ahead of us. To think that I’m there is a little bit overwhelming and humbling, but it’s a great honor that my colleagues feel that I’m worthy of it.”

The Hall of Honor Reception also recognized 29 outstanding emergency departments that received an ENA Lantern Award for 2022. The award recognizes EDs that demonstrate exceptional and innovative leadership, practice, education, advocacy and research performance. This year’s recipients were honored for an array of unique initiatives, including improved collaboration between nurses and physicians, developing new flow areas in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and undertaking a substantial quality improvement project to create a more age-friendly ED.

“We have a tendency to think that there are other hospitals out there that are bigger, better, smarter and more ‘with it’ than we are,” said Nanci Goudey, nurse manager at the Lantern Award-honored ED at Maine Medical Center in Portland. “It was a real boost to recognize that we’re up there with the big dogs. We do it right. Our staff doesn’t often think that what they do is exceptional, and it is exceptional.”

To view all the 2022 Hall of Honor Reception award winners, click the Hall of Honor Museum tab in the conference app. The 2021 Virtual Hall of Honor is also available online.

ENA Lantern Awards applications will open for 2023 in mid-November. The 2023 ENA Achievement Awards cycle will begin on Jan. 3.