Queen Silvia of Sweden Award for Jurgita Stankūnienė, Teacher and Nurse of the Health Care Faculty
The Queen Silvia Nursing Awards have been organized in Lithuania for the fourth year. Their organizers are the nursing hospital “Addere Care” and the organization established by the Queen of Sweden “Swedish Care International”, which initiates this competition in different countries.
All Lithuanian nurses and nursing students can participate in the awards. All you have to do is to submit your ideas on how to improve the quality of life and psychological well-being of people with dementia, the elderly or those in care. Each year, six ideas are submitted by the finalists, from which a panel of nursing experts selects one winner. This year, the most voted idea was proposed by Ms Stankūnienė to create a hygiene table for sick people with instructions for washing.
J.Stankūnienė, who has been working as a nurse for 24 years and holds the position of the Head of the Nursing Department at Vilniaus Kolegija, says that the idea came from experience. “When taking care of people, it is very important to ensure their hygiene every day. It often becomes a big challenge. Therefore, my idea is a mobile, compact and easily adaptive hygiene table that can be pushed to the bed, with all the necessary tools in one place and instructions for washing, if the person being taken care of has dementia syndrome. In this way, it would be more convenient for a person to wash his face, hands, brush his teeth, do his hair, maybe even apply makeup and dress up. This table is also important in that it promotes a person’s independence and helps preserve a person’s dignity,” says the author of the idea.