Falls Church native and 2001 George Mason High School graduate Nathan Hamme was named president of the Ceca Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit, last month after almost four years there as its managing director. In his high school days, Hamme was a star on the Mason basketball team that made it to the state’s final four and worked part-time at the News-Press.

The Ceca Foundation is a not-for-profit charity that celebrates caregiving excellence, promoting quality patient care by providing health care institutions with the funding, tools and best practices to recognize their outstanding caregivers. The Foundation’s Caregiver Award Program centers on a peer-to-peer recognition platform and process that creates employee engagement and learning. Caregivers who are engaged and appreciated consistently perform at higher levels, leading to improved patient care and a better patient experience. A recent Gallup study found that the engagement level of nurses was the most important variable correlating to mortality, even above staffing ratios.

Hamme has led Ceca’s day-to-day operations, product development, partner and association outreach, program implementation, and performance metric collection. “I am proud of our work to highlight industry best practices, increase caregiver satisfaction, and help reduce turnover at our nation’s acute, medium and long term care facilities — including mental health, hospice, skilled nursing, assisted living, and continuum of care organizations,” Hamme said.