JRMC’s Jenna Bredahl wins rural health professional award

Jenna Bredahl’s recognition this month points to something much closer to home than an award plaque in Grand Forks: the day-to-day systems that help Jamestown Regional Medical Center deliver safer care to Stutsman County patients. Bredahl, JRMC’s quality and risk manager, received the Outstanding Rural Health Professional Award at the 2026 Rural Health Awards Banquet at the Alerus Center, honoring the kind of behind-the-scenes work that can prevent errors, strengthen trust and keep rural care moving forward.

The Center for Rural Health says the award goes to a rural North Dakota professional who has shown leadership in rural health services and a sustained commitment to improving the health of the community served. For JRMC, Bredahl fits that description through a career that started in 2000, when she joined the hospital as a nurse aide in the medical surgery department, now called the Patient Care Unit. She moved into her current role as quality and risk manager in 2010, giving her more than two decades of institutional knowledge inside one of Jamestown’s most important health systems.

That experience has mattered in practical ways. JRMC said Bredahl helped establish its Patient and Family Advisory Council for Quality and Safety, giving patients and family members a formal role in shaping care experience and safety improvements. She also helped advance the hospital’s organ and tissue donation program, an effort that carries emotional weight for donor families and can make a direct difference for other patients across the region. LifeSource said Jamestown had four tissue donors in 2023 and an 83% authorization rate, and praised Bredahl for helping resolve a donor-family issue.

The award also reflects the kind of steady leadership rural hospitals depend on when the pressure rises. JRMC said Bredahl helped lead the facility through the COVID-19 pandemic and prepared it for earlier outbreaks such as Ebola and swine flu. In 2020, JRMC nurses selected her for the Nora Melvold Paulson Excellence in Leadership Award, another sign of how much her colleagues have relied on her judgment in moments that tested the hospital’s systems and its people.

For Jamestown and the wider Stutsman County area, that work translates into more than recognition. It supports a hospital that JRMC marked as serving the community for 90 years in 2025, and it reinforces a rural health model built on keeping quality, access and specialized decision-making close to home. Bredahl’s award lands as a reminder that in a place like Jamestown, strong local leadership can shape whether care feels reactive or reliable.