April is National Donate Life Month, a time to reflect on the lives healed through organ, eye, and tissue donation and to celebrate the 121 million Americans who have already registered as donors.
 

A California Transplant Donor Network nurse at left takes delivery of a donated heart from a surgical nurse at Community Regional Medical Center.

This month, I challenge all our Community employees to also make us a leader in the number of staff registering to become an organ donor.

Donor Network West will be in the Community Regional cafeteria on April 7 and April 14 from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. with more information about organ donation and to help people register to become an organ donor. But if you don’t make it to the cafeteria, anyone can register as a donor online at DonorNetworkWest.org or at the DMV when you get a driver’s license. 


If you want to make your organ donor registration count toward Community’s recognition please register on the link associated with your workplace:

• Clovis Community
• Community Regional
• Community Subacute & Transitional Care
• Fresno Heart & Surgical Hospital

Did you know there nearly 1,500 people in Central California waiting for an organ transplant and nearly 124,000 people nationwide need a life-saving transplant?  

Community Regional has already been recognized as a leader in providing the gift of life through its partnership with the California Transplant Donor Network and more than two decades of participation in the organ donor program. When all life-saving measures have been exhausted, our clinical teams in the emergency department and critical care units shift the focus to the possibility of saving other lives and caring for the surviving family members. Organ and tissue donation touches us here personally in one of California’s largest and busiest hospitals. Our staff in the Leon S. Peters Burn Center sees firsthand how skin grafts from 150 donors annually help save lives.

Last year in the U.S., 30,973 lives were saved by an organ transplant, 48,000 by corneal transplants, and more than one million people were healed by tissue transplants. This wouldn’t have been possible without the generosity of donors and their families. One organ donor can save the lives of up to eight people and a tissue donor can heal more than 50 others.

To learn more how the donation and transplantation process works, check out this video: http://ow.ly/Y8hiE. 
 
Kim Pope
Director of Critical Care Services
Community Regional Medical Centers