Theresa Clute Named 2023 Joan Fernbach Kingson Award Recipient

Congratulations to Theresa Clute, Nursing Assistant in the Recovery Care Center (RCC), who was selected as the 2023 recipient of the Joan Fernbach Kingson Award.

Theresa received three nominations for this year’s award, all of which noted her willingness to go above and beyond for patients and her colleagues.

One nomination said: “If you ask anyone who has interacted with Theresa Clute what they think of her the answer is always the same: ‘She is awesome!'”

All of the nominations received for Theresa remarked on her positivity, her caring and loving attention of patients and her selfless attitude toward her work.

“Theresa never seems to have downtime, because she is always taking the initiative to find a way to interject meaning in the lives and routines of others,” a nomination read.

The Joan Fernbach Kingson Award was established to recognize service or technical workers like Theresa, whose special interactions with patients and families give vivid expression to the values of care which Mrs. Kingson was committed to in her work with children and families.

Those values include treating each patient as an individual; respecting the social, emotional, intellectual, spiritual and physical needs of others, and welcoming families, especially the young, into the caring process. The often unseen gifts of service and technical workers acknowledged by this award include the gift of careful listening, the simple joy of human-to-human conversation, the sharing of silence, or the warmth of touch. In giving of themselves so generously to others, awardees help sustain the essence of humanity and exemplify the best traditions of Crouse Health.

About the Award
This annual cash prize is made possible by the family and friends of former Crouse Hospital patient Joan Fernbach Kingson, a nurse and educator who passed away in 2001. Syracuse University professor Eric Kingson was her husband and is the author of Lessons from Joan, Living and Loving with Cancer, a Husband’s Story. To see past recipients of the award, click here.