Emergency Department PA honored with Distinguished PA Award

At the Annual PA Event, held each year during National Physician Assistant Week, PAs from across the Brigham family gather to celebrate. Awards are given to honor those who go above and beyond to deliver expert patient- and family-centered care and lead positive change. Among this year’s honorees is Catherine Coquinco Llamas, PA-C, who works in the Emergency Department at both Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital and serves as the PA Quality and Safety Lead for BWFH. She was recognized with the Distinguished PA Award.

The Distinguished PA Award honors a PA who consistently demonstrates an excellence in patient care and an unwavering dedication to institutional mission, vision and core values. The recipient of this award serves as a role model within the community and the profession, as well as a leader to others.

In his presentation of the award, BWFH’s Chief Medical Officer and Vice President of Medical Affairs Scott Schissel, MD, PhD, described Llamas’s day-to-day leadership: 

Cathy serves as the BWFH ED Quality and Safety Lead, reviewing difficult cases and providing feedback to a team of more than 50 PAs and now resident cases as well. In this role, she attends monthly morbidity and mortality and peer review committee meetings and performs innumerable chart reviews for all PA cases—she is extremely skilled in processing and delivering feedback on challenging outcomes.

During the initial COVID-19 surge, Cathy was the lead PA in the Zinner COVID-19 testing site. Without any blue print, she helped implement a workflow for employee COVID-19 testing and managed training for the EM PA team.

In addition, Cathy is an invaluable resource as Peer Supporter, providing support to colleagues who have experienced a challenging clinical outcome or personal stressors.

Finally, and dear to our hearts over at BWFH, Cathy was a key lead for the BWFH ED expansion—a 4-year-long process that resulted in seamless opening of a modern and much more welcoming BWFH ED.

Llamas says she is humbled to be recognized. “It’s such an honor to have been selected to receive this award,” she says. “This award is representative of the work of my whole Emergency Medicine PA team. It recognizes the hard work of my colleagues that I spend a lot of time with working towards a goal of improving patient care.”