by Mike Bush
Patients love her. Doctors and midwives enjoy working with her. Now her peers have voted to give Chrissy Aragon the “Best Nurse Award” at Roswell Regional Hospital.
Aragon received the award as part of the hospital’s celebration of National Nurses Week May 6-12.
Chief Nurse Officer Kasi Peterson said the award is well-deserved.
“When there was no nurse manager for the labor and delivery unit, Chrissy took a leadership role, helping organize the labor and delivery unit and keeping the process going until we hired a manager,” she said.
“I always get compliments from patients,” Peterson added. “All the patients I’ve ever talked to just love her. Everyone does.”
Doctors and midwives also say they enjoy working with Aragon, she said. “Chrissy is willing to teach other nurses,” she added.
Aragon is willing to help out where she is needed, Peterson said.
“For example, when we have an obstetrical patient who needs the surgical unit, Chrissy is more than willing to come to the med-surg floor to assist taking care of those patients so those patient have better patient outcomes.”
Aragon also has a “very positive attitude and a great sense of humor,” Peterson added. “I’m glad that she’s here.”
Aragon had a different take on the award.
“To me, I think it means I am just merely a reflection of everybody around me,” she said. ”I am surrounded by wonderful people and they make me look wonderful.”
She said she was humbled by the selection, insisting that the award is “merely a reflection of what I work with — excellent, wonderful people.”
Aragon said that off and on over the past two years she has been manager and charge nurse of the labor and delivery unit. She recently stepped down from the managerial posts “just because I’m really a people person,” she said. Now, she said, she is “just one of the labor and delivery nurses.
“I love what I do and I love interacting with people,” she added. Management involves a lot more paperwork, “and at this point in my career I enjoy being hands-on still.”
She said she loves working at Roswell Regional.
“It’s very much about patient care,” she said. The hospital tries to keep the patient-to-nurse ratio a low as possible “because the focus is on patient care,” she added. “That’s really what the owners of Roswell Regional are striving to do, to give excellence in patient care.”
She also thinks highly of the doctor and midwives with whom she works.
“I feel like I work with the best doctors and midwives in New Mexico,” she said.
Aragon, a Dexter native, has an associate’s degree in nursing from Eastern New Mexico University-Roswell. She worked for 2 1/2 years in labor and delivery at Eastern New Mexico Medical Center before moving to the Center for Ambulatory Surgery and Endoscopy. She worked there for four years until Roswell Regional Hospital opened in 2007, when she went to work in the labor and delivery unit.
She is married to Manuel Aragon, a Roswell firefighter, and they have three children, Azelin, Eziah and Noamiah.
CONTACT: Mike Bush, 575-317-6249