Community Medical Center recently announced that Jennifer Bailey has been recognized as the hospital’s 2021 Mercy Award winner. The Mercy Award recognizes one employee from each of LifePoint Health’s hospitals who profoundly touches the lives of others and best represents the spirit and values on which the company was founded.  

The Mercy Award is an annual recognition program established in 2002 to honor the life and contributions of Scott Mercy, LifePoint’s founding chairman and chief executive officer. The award is considered the highest honor a LifePoint employee can receive.  

“At Community Medical Center, we share LifePoint’s commitment to making communities healthier, and we recognize this is supported by the good work and service of our employees on and off the job,” said Dr. Nicole Finke of Community Medical Center. “We are extremely proud to recognize Jen for her efforts on behalf of our patients and our community. She goes above and beyond each and every day to ensure that every person she encounters receives the highest level of care and compassion.” 

The COVID pandemic pushed healthcare workers to limits not encountered before, highlighting our resiliency, our adaptability, and our humanity. We supported our patients, our community, and one another in order to continue forging forward into the unknown. Jennifer Bailey has been the heart and soul of the laboratory at Community Medical Center for over 10 years. Her technical role is “cytotechnician” – but she is far more than the name tag belies. She embodies our culture of “Yes.”

Serve the patient. Serve the provider. Serve each other.

From the first moment we became capable of offering testing for COVID, the overwhelming need became acutely clear. People were scared and looking for answers.

Jenny recognized the community health need and set to work centralizing our testing capabilities and bolstering our supplies and our staff.

She worked with the City of Missoula, Missoula County Fire, Wildland Fire, and numerous other government agencies with local staff (Bureau of Land Management, US Forest Service etc) to establish a process through which their symptomatic staff could be rapidly tested and their essential workers returned to work.

She fostered an impressive sense of team – by highlighting the many words of gratitude that were received from patients, by working alongside them nights and weekends, by bringing cheeseburgers to her team pulling extra shifts, by continuing to emphasize how important each of their roles was during an acute crisis, by constantly saying thank you, by being a shoulder to cry on when they felt too tired to go on.

"If we are fortunate, we may encounter a uniquely gifted person with compassion for others and concern for the general welfare - Ms. Bailey is one of those rare people," said Dr. Tom Randall.

Each hospital winner, including Jen Bailey, will be considered for LifePoint’s 2021 companywide Mercy Award. The companywide winner will be announced and honored during a ceremony.