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The award-winning Brandt was president of the California School Nurses Organization for several years. “Many school administrators do not know what their nurses are doing or are capable of,” she says, “and many parents still think there is a school nurse on every campus.” (In California, about 3,000 nurses serve some 6 million students.)
Brandt believes the Nursing Hall of Fame will help the profession “celebrate and enhance its own visibility.” She is “very humbled” to be honored along with Hawkins. “For a nurse to be remembered six years posthumously, she must have been quite a contributor,” Brandt says.
A lifetime of care
Hawkins gave 37 years of her life to health care before succumbing to breast cancer in 1999. She grew up in Fresno and Santa Maria, and, according to her parents, Erwin and Audrey Tally, was already, at the age of 4, “very caring and determined to be a nurse,” just like her aunt. She went into the nursing program at CSU Fresno right out of high school, graduating in 1962. She also received a master’s from the University of San Francisco in 1995.
Hawkins began as a surgical scrub nurse, was a junior college nursing instructor, school nurse, and hospital supervisor at Sierra Community Hospital. She was the only nurse on the negotiation team that worked on the merger of University Hospital and Community Medical Center in Fresno, and took nursing leadership to a new level as the first female senior vice president, chief operating officer, and chief nurse executive for Community Medical. In this role, she led the development of the medical program during construction of Community’s downtown regional medical center.
Some of her innovative ideas included pushing for nurses to be at the center of hospital decision-making (before the concept of patient-centered care was a popular model) and developing the short-stay surgery unit. Her own battle with breast cancer led her to improve patient delivery systems, such as the Innerlink model at Sierra.
Highly honored and respected among her peers, Hawkins had a passion for her profession. “She loved nursing and made it a fun job,” her parents say. Lopez adds, “She led with her heart, and looked for leaders with this quality. … You can see a little bit of Marilyn in each employee who worked with her, since she had that level of impact on so many. … From Marilyn’s example, we learned the following: stay true to your values and principles, embrace change, nothing is impossible to achieve, take risks, there is value in teamwork, be there for people, and, finally, you gotta have fun!”
Nomination packets for next year’s award will be available in April. The form will list the criteria for nominating qualified nurses.
Look for flyers at various events, or go to the www.nursingmunu.org or www.csufresno.edu websites.
To comment on this story, send e-mail to editorca@nurseweek.com.
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