Tricia Haener is the 2024 recipient of the Oakland University Nightingale Award for Nursing Excellence in the category of Excellence in Executive Administration.
By: Dean Vaglia | Mount Clemens-Clinton-Harrison Journal | Published May 6, 2024
MOUNT CLEMENS — All her life, Tricia Haener wanted to be a nurse. This month, her life’s work will be recognized by the medical community.
Haener, McLaren Macomb’s chief nursing officer, is the recipient of the 2024 Oakland University Nightingale Award for Nursing Excellence in the category of Excellence in Executive Administration.
“It was the most humbling moment probably of my entire nursing career,” Haener said about learning that she won the award. “I felt overwhelmed with pride in being a nurse and I think I just felt overwhelmed with the fact that my peers recognized me and nominated me for this award. The executive excellence award is a very highly sought after award, and to think that they thought of me in that capacity just really was probably one of the most profound moments of my nursing career.”
Haener dreamed of being a delivery room nurse but wound up in the emergency department while in nursing school.
“I just kept going down there for work,” Haener said. “I loved it. I just fell in love with the emergency medicine immediately, and I was actually fortunate to land a job as an associate degree nurse in the emergency room at Port Huron Hospital as my first job ever. I worked the ER there for quite some time and just continued to love that acute care you have to give a patient in the emergency room. It’s always something different, you learn so much, the scope of practice is so profound and it’s the one area of nursing where you’re truly allowed to work at the highest end of your scope of practice.”
After working in Port Huron from 2006 to 2010, Haener worked as an emergency room nurse at a Michigan state prison for about a year before moving into the Henry Ford Health System as a surgical services nurse. Her career began to turn in 2016, moving Haener toward the management side of the medical industry as the director of patient care services for the Michigan Surgical Hospital.
From there she joined the Detroit Medical Center as the surgical services patient care manager in 2019. It took about a year for her to go from the surgical services position to becoming the DMC’s director of critical care, cardiovascular institute and infusions, all while tackling the challenges presented by the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic. After two years in the director role, Haener took on her current position at McLaren Macomb in 2022.
Haener entered McLaren at a pivotal time for the nursing department. Already an outsider to both the McLaren program and the wider Clinton Township-Mount Clemens community, she also had to work with a culture that was radically changed by the pandemic.
“The nursing culture kind of flipped at most hospitals because of COVID,” Doreen Hayes, a nursing director at McLaren Macomb, said. “The nurses had to work in a different environment and we started doing things differently because we had that COVID load of patients to take care of and it changed our work life. Now that we’ve come out of that horrible time, we have to get back to our basics again and there’s a lot of things we pushed to the side; initiatives that we never started that we planned to. (Haener) came in and she did a good assessment and she’s putting us on the right road and getting back to where we need to be.”
Rebuilding the structure of the nursing unit was a key part of Haener’s work after joining McLaren. She found leaders to fill empty management positions by reaching out to other hospitals to find the right people to fill the roles. The nurse internship program was also reorganized by setting up monthly meetings with each of the interns and allowing interns to change which departments they work in.
The work of nurses on the floor was of significant focus for Haener, who even got involved in the day-to-day nursing duties herself.
“One of the things that really impacted me here as a nurse leader was the fact that I did work side by side when they were short staffed,” Haener said. “I have been in the emergency department, I have worked midnights, I have worked full shifts and taken a nap and come back in to support my staff. I don’t think that anybody would say here I’ve asked them to do anything I haven’t done … I feel like in order to be a great leader you have to be willing to do anything, and I think people can see that I do that.”
Even when not directly on the floor, Haener has taken steps to improve the quality of the nurses’ experiences such as hosting regular staff support events and providing units with refreshments during major events. Haener’s leadership tenure has also seen patient infection rates go down while employee retention rates have improved. Community outreach has been a big part of Haener’s time at McLaren Macomb, leading her onto the boards of various community organizations.
“I was supposed to retire within the year after she started, and I only stayed on to help because of her,” Hayes said. “She’s a great boss to work for. I admire her. She makes great decisions, and I think myself and the managers and the other directors, we all feel like she genuinely cares for us and wants the best not only for us, but for our patients, too.”
Already impacting the lives of patients and peers in her time at McLaren Macomb, Haener is determined to keep improving the experiences of everyone under her care and give nurses the opportunities she was able to have.
“I think we have so many wonderful opportunities here and we’re such a good community partner,” Haener said. “We have an amazing trauma team, we do so many amazing things and I want to highlight those so that all the people here who do the most amount of work every day can also get recognized and be awarded the kinds of things I just got with this award.
“How I feel right now, I want every nurse in this building to have that feeling someday,” Haener said.
The Oakland University Nightingale Awards are awarded on May 8.