Heidi Sorensen, Hannah Leiterman and Pina Violano

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Recipients of the Patient Experience Award for Caring and Excellence (PEACE) are honored with two trophies – one for the winning employee to keep and one for the employee's department to display for the month until the next recipients are named. Anyone, including patients and their families, may nominate a YNHH employee, physician or volunteer who displays service excellence qualities and the values of compassion, integrity, accountability, patient-centeredness and respect. Nominations should include details illustrating why the person is worthy of the nomination. Send nominations to: [email protected].

York Street Campus

Social worker Heidi Sorensen, LCSW, and the MICU team facilitated a family's desire to donate their daughter's organs. In this case, the patient was HIV-positive, and the family knew that the HOPE law allows organ donations and transplants between HIV-positive individuals. Sorensen learned that The Johns Hopkins Hospital had recently become the first U.S. hospital to conduct these transplants, and after staff at the two hospitals conferred, the YNHH patient was cleared and five potential transplant recipients were identified at Hopkins.

Saint Raphael Campus

A family had just given birth at the Saint Raphael Campus, while at the York Street Campus the newborn's grandmother was seriously ill and might never see her grandchild. The family didn't have an infant car seat needed to bring the newborn across campuses, so social worker Hannah Leiterman, LCSW, immediately contacted Pina Violano, manager, Injury Prevention Team. Violano dropped what she was doing to drive to the hospital's storage facility for a car seat. She delivered it just in time so that the family could rush the newborn to the grandmother's bedside