2015 Excellence in Leadership Award
Carol A. Robinson, M.P.A., R.N., N.E.A.-B.C., F.A.A.N.
2015 Excellence in Leadership Award recipient Carol A. Robinson.
The 2015 recipient of the Excellence in Leadership Award from the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing at UC Davis is Carol Robinson, the director of nursing and chief patient care services officer for UC Davis Medical Center.
She oversees more than 1,800 nurses and nurse practitioners who provide care to about 200,000 patients every year in the 619-bed, acute-care hospital and its more than 100 primary- and specialty-care clinics, which handle more than 900,000 visits. Highly trained nurses support nine critical-care units in the hospital as well as 24-hour adult and pediatric emergency departments.
Under Robinson’s leadership, UC Davis Medical Center has distinguished itself as one of the best work environments for nurses in the United States. It maintains a nurse-patient ratio that meets or exceeds state-mandated staffing ratios. In addition, vacancy and turnover rates for the nursing staff are among the nation’s lowest.
Robinson introduced several innovative programs to improve patient care, including a primary-nurse model that was adopted by other hospitals, a lift-team to help with patients and a multilingual nursing team to support non-English-speaking patients during their stays at the hospital.
Other accomplishments include the successful Magnet Hospital Designation from 1997-2005 and again in 2014, the successful oversight of the development of the UC Davis Medical Center Level 1 Trauma Center program, chairperson of the Davis Tower building committee for a $150 million replacement patient care building, and recipient of more than $6.1 million in grants from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to improve the quality of care at the medical center.
Robinson joined UC Davis in 1980 as assistant director of hospital and clinics and later became director before her appointment as chief patient care services officer.
She earned a Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1973 and a Master in Public Administration from the University of San Francisco in 1986. She was named a Johnson and Johnson Wharton Fellow in 1996 and a Fellow in the American Academy of Nursing in 2002. She has published numerous articles and authored a chapter in a medical-surgical nursing textbook.
