Shea Walls, RN, has received the DAISY Award for outstanding patient care at UT Health Quitman. 

Walls was nominated by Millard Branson, who said he met Walls during the course of physical therapy following triple bypass surgery.

“She is so delightful caring and dedicated,” his nomination read. “I’m not so sure she realizes she is ‘at work’ because she truly enjoys her job and her patients and even the family members that come to therapy with the patients.”

Branson said when he met Walls he was suffering from depression after the recent death of his wife, and he wasn’t interested in self-care, but as a result of his rehab, “I personally am in a much better place all around because of her encouragement and very delightful professionalism.”

“She does so much more than physical therapy – add emotional, psychological and friendly therapy,” he wrote. “Shea definitely makes the world a better place and she reminds us how precious health and life really are.”

As a winner of the DAISY Award, Walls received a certificate, a DAISY Award pin and a sculpture called A Healer’s Touch, hand-carved by artists of the Shona Tribe in Zimbabwe. Awards are presented throughout the year at celebrations attended by the honoree’s colleagues, patients and visitors.

The DAISY Foundation is a not-for-profit organization established in memory of J. Patrick Barnes, who died in 1999 at age 33 from complications of an autoimmune disease (DAISY is an acronym for Diseases Attacking the Immune System.) The care Barnes and his family received from nurses while he was ill inspired this unique means of thanking nurses for making a profound difference in the lives of their patients and patient families.