The second annual DAISY Award for Extraordinary Nurse Leader in Healthcare Design was awarded to Tara Jernigan, nurse executive at Northeast Georgia Medical Center (NGMC; Gainesville, Ga.).
The Nursing Institute for Healthcare Design (NIHD) and The DAISY Foundation presented the award at the 2025 Healthcare Design Conference + Expo, held Oct. 25-28 in Kansas City, Mo. The honor is given to extraordinary nurses who are actively engaged in healthcare design, including as consultants, assistants, and advisors. (For more on this year’s award, read here.)
For her 2025 DAISY Award, Jernigan is credited for her role as a consultant on the 927,000-square-foot Green Tower addition at NGMC, which opened in February. Jernigan helped facilitate full-scale mock-ups of inpatient and emergency department (ED) rooms.
In this Q+A with Healthcare Design magazine, Jernigan discusses her passion for nursing and why including clinical staff on design teams can help solve those challenges.
Healthcare Design: What drew you to a career in nursing?
I’ve always enjoyed helping others. Nursing has enabled me to make a meaningful impact on others through providing direct patient care, education, and leadership.
What is the most rewarding part of your job?
There are so many rewarding parts of my job. I most enjoy hearing clinicians voice their challenges and helping them develop solutions that address their issues through space design and workflow changes.
In my role, I’m responsible for connecting the dots between hospital leadership, clinical staff, architects, construction, and other vendors. As a nurse, I understand hospital operations and can advocate for staff and patients through design.
How did you get involved with the expansion project at NGMC?
I’d been in a different role as nurse manager as part of a previous project in our system, which involved a new campus location with multiple expansions following. The Green Tower expansion had been placed on hold during COVID. When the system decided to begin the work post-COVID, I was asked to join the project.
At this time, I had been involved in several expansion projects and new builds throughout the system. My experience with construction and renovation as well as hospital operations provided a unique skill set for the organization.
How did your role evolve over the course of the project?
I wasn’t closely involved in the project initiation and had to quickly get up to speed on the scope, floor plans, patient move plan, workflow changes, and many other aspects of the project. As I became more familiar with the project and the teams, my role became more central.
Maintaining communication with the project team, consultants, departments, leadership, and the community became a key part of my role, which was new to the system. Evolution was natural; as the needs of the project changed, I grew in my role.
Why do you think it’s important for nurses to be involved in hospital design?
Nurses spend more time in patient care areas than almost any other healthcare professional. They understand how design impacts healing, safety, efficiency, and workflow. They can provide input on space design to provide family-centered care. Nurses understand how patient care happens.
Seeking input from those who will be using the space is vital. This should be done throughout the project from inception to completion. Engaging end-users through group meetings, tours, mock-ups, and other means not only maintains involvement but also allows for real-time feedback, which is invaluable.
What’s a challenge you helped address on the Green Tower addition?
The expansion project significantly increased the campus’s footprint. This created large distances between many departments. The transition and activation team partnered with our education departments to develop a virtual tour module that was assigned to each employee on the campus as an orientation to the expansion project.
Through this work, all staff members on the campus were familiar with navigating routes to and from the tower as well as the layout of the patient care areas in the tower.
We also partnered with our public relations department to develop a wayfinding guide that included connection points between the towers. The hospital campus has been expanded several times over the past 40-plus years. As a result of different building codes, the connection points between towers were challenging to navigate.
The wayfinding guide identified the connection points on the different floors, making patient transport much easier.
Looking at the industry, what’s a challenge that nurses face today and how can the healthcare design industry help address that?
Efficiency is a massive challenge for nursing. Nurses are multitaskers by nature. Designing a space that puts what they need in proximity to their work helps increase efficiency and allows them to spend more time with their patients.
In traditional nursing units, there is a central area for supplies and equipment. Designing a space where supplies and equipment needed for patient care are in close proximity to those caring for patients decreases the amount of time searching.
What does receiving the DAISY Award mean to you?
Receiving the DAISY award is an incredible honor. To me, the award represents the amazing team I worked with on the project and continue to work with each day.
Robert McCune is senior editor of Healthcare Design and can be reached at [email protected].
