Breyah Ogletree, an aide at Crouse Health’s environmental services, has been selected as the 2024 recipient of the Joan Fernbach Kingson Award.
Kingson was a nurse and educator who died in 2001. She was a patient at Crouse.
Breyah was nominated by her supervisor, who remarked on Breyah’s friendly disposition and cheerful smile.
The Joan Fernbach Kingson Award was established to recognize service or technical workers whose special interactions with patients and families give vivid expression to the values of care which 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.
This annual cash prize is made possible by the family and friends of Kingson. 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.”