National Nurses Week T-shirt Contest Generates Friendly Competition Among Cleveland Clinic Nurses

By Kelly Hancock, DNP, RN, NE-BC

As the nursing profession recently celebrated the American Nurses Association’s (ANA) National Nurses Week – a week of recognition devoted solely to the professional nurse – Cleveland Clinic hosted a wide array of activities and events to recognize our own nurses.

These included throwing the first pitch at a Cleveland Indians baseball game, hosting ‘nurses night out’ events and nursing awards ceremonies, distributing Panera Bread gift cards, and promoting our ‘thank a nurse’ and recognition programs.

Each year, we aim to add a variety of new activities and exciting events to our Nurses Week celebration and this year, one of our new activities was a T-shirt design contest. In the form of a friendly competition, we encouraged our nursing caregivers to submit design ideas for a Cleveland Clinic Nursing T-shirt.

We received more than 40 entries, from which three final designs were selected. Throughout the weeks leading up to Nurses Week, nearly 3,000 Cleveland Clinic caregivers voted on their favorite design. We proudly revealed the winning T-shirt at the start of Nurses Week 2016, making shirts immediately available for sale (proceeds from the sales were dedicated to a nurse scholarship fund).

The nurse with the winning T-shirt design was Lindsey Carlisle, BSN, RN, a member of the Internal Medicine team at Cleveland Clinic’s main campus. She received a digital media player for her efforts, but in honor of National Nurses Week, I also wanted to take this opportunity to further recognize her for her commitment to the nursing profession and share her thoughts on the Nurses Week contest.

Q: Why did you decide to enter the contest?

A: A friend of mine is a graphic design major at Cuyahoga Community College. He is very talented and I knew right away he would be willing and able to help me bring an idea to fruition.

Q: What inspired the design?

A: Several years ago for Nurses Week, our Nursing Institute gave all of our nurses bookmarks and I’ve had my bookmark on my refrigerator ever since. The bookmarks feature a great quote that inspires me daily and reminds me why I enjoy being a nurse; it was the premise for my design.

When creating the design, I thought about the reasons I love being a nurse – mainly my passion for health and wellness, empathy and compassion for others. After looking at Cleveland Clinic’s mission, vision, and values, I decided to use the logo as a border for the design. My friend then shaped it into a heart and was able to digitally color-coordinate the words with the logo. To me, the heart encompasses nursing as a caring and supportive environment for our patients. And the quote represents that our experiences as nurses are shared with patients – we are all connected.

Q: How do you feel when you see people wearing your design?

A: I definitely feel humbled. My hope was that voters would choose my design because they felt proud to be a Cleveland Clinic nurse and understand that we all make a difference. Our acts of kindness and words of encouragement are certainly ways in which we provide world-class care for our patients.

More about the winner
Carlisle says she is passionate about health and wellness and takes pride in being a wellness champion for the Internal Medicine department. She enjoys yoga, is a Reiki level 1 practitioner, and would eventually like to obtain her holistic nursing degree so she can proactively incorporate a holistic patient care approach into her work to promote wellness and disease prevention.

Kelly Hancock is the Executive Chief Nursing Officer of the Cleveland Clinic Health System, and Chief Nursing Officer of Cleveland Clinic Main Campus.