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John Muir Medical Center - Walnut Creek Campus Receives Organ Donation Medal of Honor
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) has awarded an Organ Donation Medal of Honor to John Muir Medical Center - Walnut Creek Campus. The Walnut Creek Campus was among 18 hospitals in Northern California to earn the award.
Medal of Honor winners will be recognized on October 19, 2006, at a formal dinner that will be the capstone of the second annual Organ Donation Breakthrough Collaborative National Learning Congress in New Orleans, LA. Dean Charkow, R.N., CCRN, manager, Critical Care Services and Kim Pickard, R.N., ICU/NSICU, on the Walnut Creek campus, and Julie Gabbard, our hospital liaison from the California Transplant Donor Network, will be receiving the award on behalf of the Walnut Creek Campus staff for their efforts to save and improve lives by facilitating organ and tissue donation for transplantation.
To be eligible for the Medal of Honor, hospitals must have at least 8 eligible donors in a single, continuous 12-month period and have at least 75 percent of those patients who might become organ donors become actual donors. In 2005, the Walnut Creek Campus had 26 organ donors with a donation rate of 78 percent. Because of the dedicated efforts of the hospital staff and the generosity of John Muir Medical Center organ donor families, 115 life saving transplants occurred in 2005 and 62 to date in 2006.
The hospitals and organ procurement organizations receiving this award are being honored for their exemplary leadership and commitment to organ donors, donor families, and over 93,000 patients on the national transplant waiting list. They also are being honored for the effective relationships they have developed with each other that have generated these life-saving results.Fast Facts about Organ Donation
- More than 93,000 people in the United States are waiting for organ transplants to save their lives - 2,300 of those waiting are children under the age of 18. Currently, almost 9600 of these men, women and children are in the Transplant Network's Northern and Central California service area.
- Each day, 18 people - one every 90 minutes - die in the United States because of a shortage of organ donors. In 2004, more than 6,000 individuals died on the U.S. organ-transplant waiting list because the organs they needed were not donated in time.
- One person can potentially save up to eight lives as an organ donor, and improve the lives of more than 50 others through tissue donation. To become a donor, go to donateLIFEcalifornia.org. At this website one can both officially record their wish to be a donor and notify their family.
(Posted October 17, 2006)