At this year’s Elmhurst College Department of Nursing and Health Sciences convocation ceremony, graduating nursing students presented Elmhurst Fire Chief Jeff Bacidore and Elmhurst Memorial Hospital Chief Nursing Officer Pamela Dunley with the Marilyn Graber Friends of Nursing Award.

Seniors and faculty members in the nursing department vote on who will receive the annual award, which honors an individual or group outside the Elmhurst College Department of Nursing who has made significant contributions to the nursing students’ educational experience.

Chief Bacidore and the Elmhurst Fire Department collaborated with the Elmhurst College nursing department last summer to develop intensive simulation exercises for City of Elmhurst emergency personnel and Elmhurst College nursing students. The exercises, which involved creating medical-emergency scenarios using the College’s simulated robotic patients, provided training for the first responders, education for Elmhurst nursing students and ambulance transport of the simulated patients from the campus to their new home in the Elmhurst College Simulation Center at Elmhurst Memorial Hospital.

Pamela Dunley was instrumental in enhancing the relationship between Elmhurst College and Elmhurst Memorial Healthcare, making the Elmhurst College Simulation Center at Elmhurst Memorial Hospital a reality. Dunley not only helped secure the space in the hospital but also leveraged relationships to enhance the space and secure clinical equipment for the facility, which opened last fall.

The Marilyn Graber Friends of Nursing Award is sponsored in Graber’s memory by her friends at the Elmhurst Afternoon Woman’s Club for her many years of devotion and dedicated service. An Elmhurst alumna, Graber also was a longtime contributor to and supporter of Elmhurst College, particularly of the College’s nursing and science programs. one of her more significant gifts to the College was a SimBaby, a life-size, robotic model of an infant that nursing students work with during simulation exercises. Graber was posthumously awarded the Elmhurst College Founders Medal in 2012 for her philanthropic and personal service to the College.