Socially distanced celebrations?

[ICUnurse990, BSN, RN]

Hello all,

I am an ICU nurse manager, and I’m hoping to get some ideas on how to celebrate my staff in a way that is safe and physically distanced.

My hospital postponed our Nurses Week celebration for July because things were still pretty crazy in May. Normally, we have a different little celebration every week day. It’s usually food-centric, because we don’t have the budget to buy gifts for our whole department and buying food is (relatively) cheap.

With COVID-19, I’m hesitant to a) bring in food for everyone to share, and b) encourage folks to congregate in the break room to eat. However, with a large staff (over 150) and a very limited budget (it’s usually enough to buy pizza one day and then the leadership team personally finds the rest), I am running low on ideas!

Any suggestions?? What do your facilities do for Nurses Week, and/or did anything change this year due to the pandemic?

[Wuzzie]

Not for nurses week but our manager did a baked potato bar. The potatoes were foil-wrapped but the really cool thing was there were individual containers that each had salt, pepper, butter, sour cream, broccoli, bacon bits and shredded cheese. The vegetarian ones had no bacon and were also gluten free. We could use whatever we wanted out of our containers and there was no communal serving. They were also delicious.

I tried to find a picture but I can’t. They were really cute.