HAP Achievement Awards Spotlight: Penn Highlands DuBois

May 23, 2025

HAP's annual Achievement Awards honor hospitals and health systems for their innovation, creativity, and commitment to patient care. The Achievement Awards showcase and share member hospitals’ and health systems’ successful programs and best practices.

Penn Highlands DuBois received the Workforce Innovators Award for advancing nursing excellence through professional development and shared decision-making, supported by Pathway to Excellence certification.

Here’s what you need to know:

• The challenge:  Despite foundational efforts, the hospital faced fragmented nursing governance, inconsistent engagement, and limited momentum toward nursing excellence due to turnover, competing priorities, and lack of a unified strategy.
• Addressing the Issue:  To overcome these barriers, the team identified the need for a formalized, organization-wide structure aligned with Pathway to Excellence standards to unify efforts and elevate nursing practice.
• Taking Action:  The team launched a staff-led campaign to build awareness of the Pathway to Excellence program, using creative themes, monthly education, and unit champions to connect the six standards to daily practice. A self-assessment, interactive rounding, and frontline-driven application efforts ensured meaningful participation and ownership.
• Results:  The hospital achieved Pathway to Excellence designation with 71 percent staff participation, meeting all American Nurses Credentialing Center criteria and earning a four-year certification.
• Advancing Care:  Despite the challenges of being a rural hospital, leadership reflected in their submission that the team succeeded by “thinking outside the box with extremely limited funding and resources because of the ownership and pride of not only what the designation would mean but lifting their colleagues and emphasizing the difference they are making for themselves, their profession, community and patients.”

Congratulations to Penn Highlands DuBois for its outstanding efforts to strengthen the health care workforce and transform care delivery. Learn more about the project online.

Questions about the HAP Achievement Awards may be directed to HAP Member Services at (717) 561-5359.