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 McKnight Prize for Healthcare Outbreak Heroes. Administered under the CDC Foundation, through the Evelyn and Thomas McKnight Family Fund for Patient Safety, the Prize recipient will receive a $1,000 honorarium and an award.

The 2024 McKnight Prize nomination period is currently closed.

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.

Primary Award Criteria: Please submit an example within the last two years of how the nominee personally displayed:

• Outstanding success, initiative and extraordinary personal commitment or sacrifice in protecting patients from harm in the context of a healthcare outbreak; please see nomination form for further detail on how to describe this accomplishment.
• 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.

Additional Considerations: Extra weight may be given to submissions that describe nominees who have personally 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.
• 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:

2023 - Jennifer Jones, RN, BSN, CPEN, for an outstanding response to a Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) outbreak in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. 

2022 - Lisa Hannah, RN, CIC, for exemplary infection prevention leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic.

2021 - All frontline long term care staff in the United States for the heroism and bravery exercised during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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