Recognizing Our Leaders: The Celebration Continues

This week we continued our 50th Anniversary Celebration with our Because of Leadership Event A Tribute to our Visionaries, Founders, Leaders and Benefactors. At the event were representatives of our founder organizations, members of our Virginia Sherwood and Kroh Societies, current and present HealthCare and Gilchrist Board members, members of the Philanthropy Committee and many other people from the community who have been important in the history of GBMC. We recognized three acts of leadership: service, innovation and philanthropy. Jamie Costello the nightly anchor of ABC News 2 –WMAR served as the master of ceremony and Cal Ripken, Jr. gave an excellent address on leadership.

Among the highlights of the evening were the playing of the tape recording of the invocation given by Reverend Richard H. Baker at the dedication of the hospital in 1965 and a video celebrating GBMC’s founding that included the voices of Milton and Dwight D. Eisenhower, the former President of the United States. The evening was a wonderful event and a great opportunity to celebrate our leaders past and present.



Central Sterile Processing

Last month we began the work to protect our operating rooms and central sterile processing from electrical outages like the ones that caused the cancellation of numerous surgeries last summer. The first step was to relocate the central sterile operations to a temporary location in order to rebuild the department and to add heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) upgrades to improve the temperature and humidity controls.

Since then, temporary CSP trailers, compliant to The Joint Commission (TJC) and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) standards, have been stationed in the Bluebell parking lot.  These trailers are equipped with similar state-of-the-art equipment to what we have had in the main department to assure that all of our surgical instruments are processed according to our high standards.

As most folks may or may not be aware, the CSP department plays a vital role in reprocessing reusable devices (primarily surgical instrumentation) for GBMC. Currently, the construction is on target with an estimated completion date of Friday May 1, 2015. CSP staff will be able to reoccupy the space beginning Wednesday May 6, 2015.

Please join me in thanking Steve Adams, the Manager of Central Sterile and his Team for their outstanding work.