First TULIP Award recipient announced
FRESNO, Calif. (KSEE/KGPE) – Community’s new TULIP Award stands for trustworthy, understanding, loyal, innovative and proud.
The award is given to outstanding members of the Trauma Multidisciplinary Team. The first recipient is Courtney Young, a speech-language pathologist for Community who colleagues say has gone above and beyond to help her patients in every way possible.
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Helping trauma patients takes an entire team of medical professionals and among the group are speech pathologists.
“To care for them and speech pathology help them get back on the road to speaking again, and eating again being able to live their life,” said Eliana Troncale, Injury Prevention Outreach Specialist at Community Regional Medical Center.
Courtney works with patients each day to help them improve after traumas they have suffered.
“In general, we work with swallowing disorders, which the technical term is dysphasia. We work with patients that have trach tubes,” she said. “We work with patients that have cognitive deficits, either a traumatic brain injury, or a stroke, or a brain tumor.”
Courtney always knew she wanted to work in the medical field.
“My mom is an RN and for the longest time I thought I’d be a nurse and then I thought I’d be a veterinarian. I did not want to go through that much school,” she said.
After attending Fresno State with an undeclared major, Courtney met a friend who worked in the Speech Pathology program at Community.
“She said, I think you might enjoy speech pathology after she got to know me a little bit and she said why don’t you take the introduction classes, so I took the introduction classes and I really enjoyed it,” she said.
Courtney has been working as a speech pathologist for 20 years.
Her colleagues said it was her commitment to working with her patients that made them nominate her for the TULIP Award.
“It was nice to be recognized because it made me feel like the part that I feel that it’s very important but it was a nice validation to know that other people see it as an important piece of the puzzle,” said Courtney.
