LifeChoice recognizes Day Kimball Hospital

Reminder News | By Denise Coffey

Day Kimball Hospital recently received a “Summit Award” from LifeChoice Donor Services. The award recognized DKH for “leadership, commitment and dedication to saving lives every day,” which resulted in a 50-percent tissue conversion rate for 2012. DKH’s rate is 13 percent higher than the LifeChoice average. That difference represents lives saved or improved with transplants.

Those lives were saved in one of two ways: either people registered as organ donors, or families faced with the death of loved ones agreed to donate their organs. These are difficult decisions to make. They are also crucial ones. According to federal statistics, 120,201 people are waiting for tissue and organ transplants in the U.S. Eighteen people die daily for lack of available organs. Just one organ donor can save up to eight lives.

DKH Senior Vice President, COO and CNO Donald St. Onge said the effort to educate people about the need for organ donation is crucial. Educating the public and bringing about a level of awareness of the need for tissue and organ donation is a team effort, he said. “There may be a time in your life where difficult decisions need to be made,” he said. “The more ways you communicate that, be it an advanced directive, living will or donor sticker on your license, the more likely people will know what you want.”
______________________________________________________ 
"You have the power to SAVE lives." 
To register as a donor TODAY
In California: 
www.donateLIFEcalifornia.org | www.doneVIDAcalifornia.org 
Outside California: 
www.organdonor.gov | www.donatelife.net

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Heart transplant recipient celebrates graduation with donor’s mom

Image
A.J. Reyes, right, talks with Mary Knauer prior to a graduation ceremony for Samuel Merritt University nursing program students in Oakland, Calif. on Friday, May 26, 2017. Knauer's son was killed in a motorcycle crash in 2010 and Reyes received his heart in an organ transplant. (Kristopher Skinner/Bay Area News Group) At 25, AJ Reyes was suffering from congestive heart failure and running out of time. Unless the Vallejo resident got another organ to replace his damaged one, his doctors told him he would be dead within five years. Reyes went on the California Transplant Donor Network waiting list and in November of 2010, he got the call that he had been praying for. A strong, healthy heart had become available. But his joy was clouded by the knowledge that the news meant another family’s nightmare. Justin Olivera, a 40-year-old man from Willows, a small rural town in Northern California, had just been killed in a motorcycle accident. Olivera was an organ donor, and his heart...
Read more

The Kidney Crisis

Image
Hour Detroit Magazine | By Monica Mercer // Photographs by Josh Scott Myths about organ donation and transplantation are still contaminating the real issues behind a silent health problem Dr. Alan Koffron can conjure scene after scene from the medical TV genre where human kidneys have been integral to the plot: residents dropping them on the floor, crooked doctors profiting from organ trafficking, the wrong kidney placed in the wrong body. Kidney transplantation â€" the most commonly performed of all transplant procedures in the world â€" ranks high on the medical dramatics scale, Koffran says, but he’s not sure why. An organ transplantation surgeon with Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Koffron has performed thousands of kidney transplants. He and the other medical professionals involved in the process across the country know how heavily regulated it is in the United States, with checks and balances so strong that rarely does a kidney transplant involve any- thing remotely a...
Read more

Hawthorne woman's liver donation saves cousin, the 'big sister' she never had

Image
North Jersey | Lindy Washburn CARMINE GALASSO/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER Jennifer Carrino, left, and cousin Nina Walsh showing off their surgery scars. Nina donated a portion of her liver to her older cousin, likely saving her life. Over the last year, Jennifer Carrino had come back from the brink of death, survived internal bleeding and spent weeks in intensive care. Then came the hard part: asking her cousin for a part of her liver. In April, doctors told Jennifer that without a transplant she probably had a year to live. Jennifer, 37, was already on transplant waiting lists in two states, but it was going to take too long, they said. She needed to think about a living donor. Jennifer turned to her younger cousin, Nina Walsh, a slip of a woman with an outsized sense of generosity. She asked her to consider giving up part of her healthy liver. The procedure, pioneered 20 years ago, pushes the ethical boundaries of medicine because it goes against a basic tenet of medicine to “first do no ha...
Read more