King’s Daughter Medical Center honored the memory of one of its most beloved nurses in a ceremony for the dedication of its new auditorium Wednesday. 

The new auditorium was officially declared the “Robby Sauls Auditorium / Robby’s Adventure Room” in honor of emergency room nurse Robby Sauls who died in June 2014.

KDMC CEO Alvin Hoover read the declaration that recognized Sauls as one of the first employees to complete the Great Performance Improvement Adventure in 2011. The declaration read that Sauls stepped up and challenged KDMC to provide better patient care and improve patient satisfaction.

Hoover said that Sauls was instrumental in efforts centered around employee improvement that are known and referred to now as the Great Performance Improvement Adventure and Destination Always.

“Robby served as an inspiration to all of us, and it’s an honor for us to dedicate this room in his memory,” Hoover said. “Robby wanted to get it right every time. He wanted to give great healthcare, and he was a leader for us in helping our hospital move forward with improving our care.”

Hoover said the Destination Always initiative started about six ago as a program to teach staff how easy it is to participate in performance improvement and how to be involved in that endeavor.

“It is about measuring and benchmarking with other facilities and finding the best practices and learning how to implement those at our hospital,” he said.

Hoover said Sauls became the example for the hospital’s efforts, the cheerleader and the poster child for the program as he strived for excellence and challenged his peers in patient care.

“If you look at what we’ve accomplished in the past six or seven years since we really got going with Destination Always, we’ve been recognized as one of the Top 100 Hospitals in America for Outstanding Patient Experience,” Hoover said during the ceremony. “We’ve been recognized as a Top 100 Best Place to Work because our employees are engaged with us and care about the work that we do.

“Medicare just changed their rating system to a five-star system, and we’re one of 251 hospitals in the country to get five stars out of 3,553 hospitals that participated,” he said. “And we can thank Robby for that, and his family because y’all all helped make Robby who he was.”

Hoover said Sauls was not the one who wanted to be in promotional videos and the like, not wanting the attention and spotlight, but that he shared his story of dedication to patient care as a favor immortalized in a video about the program that was shown at the ceremony.

“We’ve come back with a facility where we do our training,” Hoover said. “We have had over 800 employees go through this training.

“We come in this room and say ‘This is Robby’s room. And we’re going to teach about employee improvement. We’re going to teach how to measure things and how to use benchmarks and to use best practices.’ When we compare ourselves to somebody that’s good, we’ll get better.”

Many attended the dedication in honor of the ER nurse who worked more than 15 years at KDMC. Robby’s wife Stacy Sauls and their children, Maddie Claire, Preston and Molly were in attendance. Stacy Sauls said it was a very special day, and the family is proud and honored. Stacy said the family wanted to express thanks to the hospital for the dedication.

“Robby was a very competent nurse, very capable, very compassionate and always caring about the people that he worked with as well as the people he was taking care of,” Hoover said. “And it’s an honor for us to be able to think back about what Robby brought us.”