Sarah Williams, RN, CEN is the recipient of the Edith M. Prichard Memorial Scholarship. She obtained her undergraduate nursing degree at Suffolk Community College, her Bachelor of Science at SUNY Cortland, and is currently enrolled in the Masters’ of Science in Nursing Education program at SUNY Empire State College.

Sarah first began her career working with developmentally disabled adults as a direct care counselor and as an emergency medical technician. She began to do prehospital emergency medicine while completing her undergraduate degree and fell in love. She further developed her certifications in prehospital medicine and became an advanced pre-hospital provider responding to critical patients and situations providing advanced and critical care to sick and injured patients as a first responder. As her love for emergency medicine further developed, she decided to follow in her mother and grandmothers’ footsteps and put herself through school to become a nurse. In the field of nursing, she began her career working on a cardiothoracic step-down unit. After a short time, she transferred to her real love, the emergency department. Once in the ED, she transitioned from staff nurse to transport nurse, clinician, and now educator. She realized that her passion lay in teaching new nurses, patients, and their families. As her commitment for education grew stronger, she decided to obtain her master’s degree in nursing education.

Sarah currently works in an emergency department in a Level 1 Trauma Center on Long Island, New York as a Nurse Educator. Though new to the role, she hopes to educate new nurses to the field of emergency nursing and show existing ED nurses how to nurture them. She is a course director for the Trauma Nursing Core Course at her facility, teaching trauma care to the many nurses at the hospital, showing them the importance of trauma resuscitation and care. Sarah feels strongly about life-long learning, commitment to her profession, and is certified as an Emergency Nurse, as well as maintaining her membership in the Emergency Nurses’ Association. She tries to inspire nurses to feel empowered by knowledge through her teaching. With her degree soon in hand, Sarah hopes to continue teaching at the bedside and expand to teaching in the classroom.