By Daphne Sashin
“It was the second most painful day of our lives,” wrote Albert Jones, BSN, a utilization reviewer in Case Management at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center (PPMC).
The first was when he and his wife, Cheryl, a retired PPMC nurse, lost their daughter, Christina, to an accidental drug overdose in 2017. The second came two years later, when their 31-year-old son, Jonathan Paul, died unexpectedly from severe upper gastrointestinal bleeding. Due to the circumstances of their daughter’s death, they couldn’t donate her organs. But when their son passed, Jones said, “we were blessed to be able to.”
Presby staff on Cupp 4 East
Jones and his wife later learned from the Lions Eye Bank of Delaware Valley that two people were able to see again, through their son’s eyes. He and two other PPMC staff members wrote about their personal experiences with the lifesaving gift of organ donation as part of The Hospital and Healthsystem Association of Pennsylvania (HAP)’s Donate Life Hospital Challenge in April. Their stories were featured in the daily PPMC Need to Know email among many other events that PPMC staff participated in throughout the month.
The Donate Life Hospital Challenge was created to spread awareness among hospital communities – staff, patients, families, and vendors – about the critical need for more organ, tissue, and cornea donors, and to encourage individuals to sign up on their states’ organ donor registries. Susan Chodoff, MBA, director of Regulatory and Accreditation Matters, and George Iyoob, BSN, MHA, director of Trauma and Orthopedics, chaired the campaign for Presby.
“Sue and I are proud of how the PPMC team embraced the challenge through various events throughout the month, most importantly getting the message out around the importance of organ donation awareness and donor designation,” Iyoob said.
PPMC’s Perioperative Care Unit (PCU), led by Clinical Nurse Educator Rebecca Murphy, BSN, and Nurse Manager Jennifer Goodman, MSN, baked desserts and held a food drive for the nonprofit Gift of Life Family House, which has provided comfort to thousands of transplant families, while other Presby staff joined Team Penn Medicine at the 25th annual Gift of Life Donor Dash on April 24. Units from all over the hospital posed for pictures with a Donate Life banner to show their support.
Communications Specialist Bridget McQuate, the editor of Need to Know, made the challenge come alive with Gift of Life stories, messages, and photos every day of the month.
“The whole month of April left us feeling a bit warmer,” Chodoff said. “We talked about donation at all kinds of different meetings. At a Facilities/Safety meeting, everybody on the call stated they were registered donors. Assistant Executive Director Gary Ginsberg even opened his wallet to show his license!”
The staff who wrote about their personal experiences with organ donation, Chodoff said, “truly made a difference in raising awareness.”
Social worker Elizabeth Peto, MSW, has always wondered how it felt for her mom to take her first breath after her lung transplant in 2018. “I don’t know who her lungs lived in before, but I wish I could say thank you,” Peto wrote.
Nurse Kim Calhoun and her daughter, Carly, at the Gift of Life Donor Dash.
Kim Calhoun, MSN, CCRN, a nurse in the Perioperative Care Unit, shared that her teenaged daughter Carly received the gift of sight from Lion’s Eye Bank when she received a corneal transplant in her right eye at the Scheie Eye Institute. This year marks the fifth anniversary of her transplant, and Calhoun and her daughter ran the Donor Dash to honor Carly’s donor. Carly also speaks often about her corneal transplant experience at events for the Eye Bank.
“Since receiving the transplant, Carly’s vision has improved significantly,” Calhoun wrote. “We are so grateful to her donor family for this incredible gift.”
To learn more about donation and to sign up through your state’s registry, please visit donors1.org.