Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center receives USHHS Medal of Honor for organ donation rates

PHOENIX (May 23, 2005) – Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center, Arizona's busiest and most experienced transplant hospital, received one of the inaugural Organ Donation Medals of Honor from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Health Resources and Services Administrations.

Karen Blanco, RN, and Gail Farrell, DNA's in-house coordinator at Banner Good Samaritan, accepted the Medals of Honor for the hospital.

The medal was presented to Banner Good Samaritan for achieving life-saving organ donation rates of 75 percent or more for a sustained 12-month period. Three other Phoenix-area hospitals–Maricopa Medical Center, Scottsdale Healthcare Osborn, and John C. Lincoln North Mountain–and the Donor Network of Arizona (DNA), the state's organ procurement organization, also received Medals of Honor.

The awards were formally presented on May 19, 2005 in Pittsburgh, Pa., during a capstone dinner and ceremony for the first annual Organ Donation Breakthrough Collaborative National Learning Congress. HHS plans to continue to award these Medals of Honor for organ donation as part of future annual National Learning Congresses.

Banner Good Samaritan and the other organizations were recognized for their exemplary leadership and commitment to organ donors, donor families and the more than 88,000 Americans on the national waiting list as well as for the effective relationships they have developed with one another that have generated these life-saving results.

"We congratulate the Intensive Care Units and Emergency Department staffs for all the hard work they do, because that's where this tough work happens," said Eileen Polito, director, Transplant Services at Banner Good Samaritan. "They are the ones who have first contact with the patients and families, make the referral to Donor Network of Arizona and work with the families to make donation happen. It takes special people to do this work in the face of personal tragedy, but they do the job with compassion and empathy for the patient and the family."

To be eligible for the Medal of Honor, hospitals must have had at least eight eligible donors in a single, continuous 12-month period between September 2003 and March 2005. The hospitals and DNA collaborated to convert at least 75 percent of these eligible donors to actual donors.

The Collaborative initiative's goal is to achieve organ donation rates of 75 percent or better in participating hospitals. Collaboratives are a program of technical assistance, learning sessions, site visits, conference calls and data reporting/tracking that help participants identify, adapt, test and implement the best practices known to produce high donation rates.

Organ donation increased by an unprecedented 10.8 percent in 2004. Nationally, the 2004 increases generated nearly 1,400 additional life-saving transplants over the prior year. In Arizona, results for the first four months of 2005 are 50 percent above the monthly records established in 2004.

Currently, there are more than 1,000 Arizonans waiting for life-saving organs. In the U.S., this waiting list grows by one every 13 minutes; while 17 people die each day because the organ they need did not come.

Many people believe they have already registered because they once checked a box on their license or carried a donor card. However the only way to officially register your wishes to be an organ donor is to sign up on the Arizona Donor Registry via the Internet at http://www.azdonorregistry.org/ or by calling 1-800-94-DONOR.

Banner Health, working in partnership with the DNA, has established the Banner Health Donor Team, which is promoted in the America West Arena with the Phoenix Suns and Phoenix Mercury basketball teams. More than 1,400 Arizonans have become registered organ donors through this program. For more information on the Banner Health Donor Team, please visit www.BannerHealth.com, keyword: Donor Team.