Dr. Evelyn McKnight is a nationally recognized patient safety advocate and survivor of one of the largest viral outbreaks in American health care history. An audiologist and mother of three, Dr. McKnight was battling a recurrence of breast cancer when she learned she had been infected with hepatitis C during her treatment due to failure of health care professionals to follow fundamental injection safety practices. Dr. McKnight turned her own personal tragedy of being infected with Hepatitis C in 2002 into a crusade to save lives.

Evelyn, her husband Thomas McKnight and Travis Bennington formed the HONOReform Foundation in 2007 to protect patients through safeguarding the medical injection process and to encourage health care providers to follow fundamental injection safety practices. When HONOReform Foundation began it was the only organization that was educating about injection safety. But over the course of 11 years, it worked itself out of a job. The HONOReform Foundation dissolved at the end of 2018, but the Board of Directors wanted to continue to support injection safety and, more broadly, patient safety through the creation of an endowed fund with the CDC Foundation, the Evelyn and Thomas McKnight Family Fund for Patient Safety.

The purpose of the Fund is to honor and recognize important work to promote safe injection practices and patient safety and produce educational materials that raise awareness and highlight the work of the One & Only injection safety campaign. The fund will also be used to maintain an annual award, The McKnight Prize for Healthcare Outbreak Heroes, to honor and recognize people who are doing important work to promote safe injection practices or patient safety.

The McKnight Prize for Healthcare Outbreak Heroes

To encourage and reward those who serve and protect patients from harm in the context of healthcare outbreak response in the United States, we are honored to recognize these deserving individuals with the establishment of this new prize. Administered under the CDC Foundation, through the Evelyn and Thomas McKnight Family Fund for Patient Safety, we are proud to announce the inaugural presentation of the McKnight Heroes Prize. The recipient will receive a $1,000 honorarium and an award.

The 2021 award recognizes all frontline nursing home staff in the United States for the heroism and bravery exercised during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Applications for the 2022 McKnight Prize will open in November 2021.  

Nominations will be accepted on behalf of candidates who come from a variety of professions including, but not limited to nurses, physicians, public health professionals, administrators and advocates. The following criteria should be met within the last 3 years in order to merit consideration for this award. Criteria are listed in order of importance. 

• Nominee has displayed outstanding initiative and success in accelerating or otherwise enhancing the response to an outbreak that affected one or more healthcare facilities or patient populations.
   
• Nominee has displayed exceptional leadership in enhancing communication between clinicians, clinics, hospitals, public health offices etc. and affected patients or the public, in the context of a healthcare  outbreak investigation.
   
• Nominee has displayed active, sustained involvement in patient safety, healthcare, or public health, resulting in recent advancements related to basic infection control (e.g., safe injection practices), healthcare outbreak reporting and investigation, or patient notification and public disclosure practices.

Recipients of the McKnight Prize for Healthcare Outbreak Heroes:

2020 - Maureen Tierney, MD, MSc, for initiating and overseeing the investigation of E coli sepsis related to a nationally-distrubuted, unapproved biologic product administered to patients seeking relief from arthritis and degenerative diseases.