Victoria Kyles MED, LPC, NCC, is an adolescent therapist at Logos School and was named the Creve Coeur-Olivette Chamber of Commerce Educational Professional of the Year.   

Victoria is passionate and dedicated to her students and their families. She is welcoming and accepting of where a student is in their journey. She meets them where they are and offers guidance and support to help them work through their challenges and trauma to have the opportunity to be their best. She works beyond normal work hours in crisis situations.

Victoria has gone beyond the expectations of her job by doing home visits with students and families, visiting students in the hospital, shopping for students' personal necessities, and helping students with their work at school while all other students are working virtually.

Victoria has been a therapist at LOGOS since August of 2019.  She loves being able to renew students' hope in therapy. One of the most common things she hears from students is that they hate therapy or don’t think they need a therapist. Victoria’s perspective is that something very special happens when one person decides to trust another person. It’s that pivotal moment that makes it all worth it for her. She says, “Once you fight past that resistance and those planted seeds start to bloom, you meet a beautiful flower on the other side.”

Elizabeth Kessel, RN, BSN, is an occupational health nurse at Barnes Jewish West County Hospital and was named the Creve Coeur-Olivette Chamber of Commerce Health Care Professional of the Year.

Elizabeth was an integral part of our hospital's and BJC HeathCare's COVID-19 response. Early in the pandemic, Elizabeth worked quietly behind the scenes to keep BJWCH team members, patients, and families safe by coordinating efforts to ensure clinical staff was fit-tested for N95 respirators. As the pandemic continued, her work was critical in ensuring BJWCH team members – and by extension patients and families – were educated on COVID precautions. She monitored and tracked exposures to decrease the risk of disease transmission among both staff and patients. She worked countless hours with a consistent attitude of caring and concern for the health and wellbeing of the BJWCH team and community at large, serving on-call 24-hours a day, 7 days a week, while also providing support to other academic hospitals within BJC. She also assisted the BJC system in setting up public COVID testing sites.

Elizabeth established and managed COVID vaccination clinics that served employees across BJC, and due to her dedication and leadership, these clinics had a less than 1% waste rate of vaccine doses. This frequently entailed her staying at the hospital for hours after her shift would have typically ended to find individuals to take these extra doses left in opened bottles so they would not have to be destroyed. 

Elizabeth did all of this in addition to her usual job responsibilities, which include keeping BJWCH highly reliable through managing and finding the root causes of employee injuries, providing education and recommending interventions to prevent further occurrences. 

Elizabeth embodies the BJC Values of Compassion, Respect, Excellence, Safety and Teamwork through all of her interactions, and is a trusted advisor and knowledge expert in her field. 

Elizabeth has done so much over the past two years that it’s difficult to encapsulate it all in a few paragraphs. During 24 months of uncertainty and, at least early on, near-constant change as our understanding of this disease grew and evolved, Elizabeth has provided the foundation of BJWCH’s ability to weather this pandemic and care for each other and the communities we serve.