JRMC honors Tara Simonsen with DAISY Award for compassionate care

Bethany Anderson said Tara Simonsen did more than provide routine nursing care at Jamestown Regional Medical Center. Anderson said Simonsen checked in constantly, treated her family as people rather than a task, helped ease fears during labor and postpartum recovery, then arranged for the family to leave through a heated ambulance bay to avoid harsh winter weather. Simonsen also personally helped the family and made sure the baby’s car seat was secured before they left.

That kind of attention is what earned Simonsen, a registered nurse in JRMC’s Family BirthPlace, the DAISY Award for Extraordinary Nurses, which the hospital presented on May 8, 2026. The honor recognizes the kind of bedside care that families in Jamestown and Stutsman County remember long after a hospital stay ends, especially during one of the most vulnerable moments in a family’s life.

JRMC said the DAISY Award program honors nurses for compassion and clinical excellence. The hospital joined the internationally recognized program in October 2024 and said DAISY stands for Diseases Attacking the Immune System. The DAISY Foundation was inspired by the care J. Patrick Barnes received before his death in 1999, and the program now honors nurses in more than 30 countries.

Honorees receive a certificate, a DAISY pin and the hand-carved sculpture A Healer’s Touch. JRMC said it can select DAISY honorees up to three times a year, giving patients and families a direct way to recognize care that feels personal, steady and human when they need it most.

For Simonsen, the award adds to a record of peer recognition inside the hospital. JRMC nurses previously selected her as the recipient of the 2022 Nora Melvold Paulson Excellence in Leadership Award. The latest honor also arrives after JRMC earned Pathway to Excellence designation in December 2025, making it the first and only healthcare facility in North Dakota to do so.

Together, those milestones point to a nursing culture that JRMC says values both skill and compassion. In Simonsen’s case, Anderson’s experience showed how that looks in practice, from easing fear during childbirth to helping a family get safely into the North Dakota winter with a new baby.