We have
been enjoying a good year at the TRIO-Pittsburgh Chapter.
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- We have
a total of 87 members – with a breakdown of 48 Family & 39
Individual
memberships.
We also have among these
members 35 are also TRIO International Members.
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- The
following events have been organized or attended by our TRIO members:
* Organ & Tissue Donor
Awareness Week - was held the week
prior to our celebration dinner. We
volunteered at the information tables throughout the week at several of
the
participating hospitals in the area.
Many of our recipients participated in the parade through Presby & Montefiore
Hospital on
Tuesday to thank the
hospital employees for the care and dedication.
Tee shirts were handed out with the green ribbon logo
printed on them
and each participant was given a sharpie for autographs on the shirt. Also during this time TRIO – Pittsburgh
provided the transplant nursing
units and OR’s with balloons for National Transplant Nurses day. We were finally given the “OK” from UPMC to
paint green ribbons on several of the windows across the Bridge. I also
presented
Dr. Starzl with his album that we had made with pictures and thank you
letters written
by TRIO members in honor of his 80th birthday.
I had the wonderful honor of signing donor
cards with Dr. Starzl at the information table for 1 hour.
He is truly a remarkable and very sweet man.
* Celebration
of Life Dinner was held in April. It
was our best attended program in many
years. We honored our OPO CORE. The President & CEO of CORE and many of
their employees were in attendance. We
gave a beautiful Thomas Kincaid picture for the new family room that
CORE has
just completed. The room will be used
for donor families and their organ recipient to meet.
* We initiated
the Beads of Courage program in conjunction with
Children’s Hospital cardiac surgery department.
It has been even a bigger success than even my contact at
Children’s
imagined. There have been several
articles written in our local papers (mentioning TRIO – Pittsburgh’s
generous donation) and even a
recent television interview with one of the heart transplant recipients
and he
had his string of beads showing them off.
* Our Picnic was
very well attended but disappointingly it was a real
“wash-out”. We still had a great time
playing bingo and eating, eating & eating.
We certainly do have a group of wonderful cooks among us. There were several attendees that were really
disappointed because we did not set up the Karaoke due to all of the
rain. Maybe next year…
*
Several of our members attend
the Heart-to-Heart picnic in September for the heart patients from
Children’s
Hospital. This was somewhat of a victor
for us; we have never been included in any of their activities. I have already spoken to the director of the
Cardiac Surgery department and she wants us to attend again next year. Several of the parents remarked that they
were very excited and happy with the Bead program that we were
contributing
to.
* We will have
our Holiday Party on December 15th, we are gong
to the same restaurant as last year, it just has a new name “Amici”
& is
under new management.
- We decided that we are going to try the
“Sunday Transplant Movie Matinee”. We
printed out the article from the TRIO-International website and are
going to
try this for at least 1 of our Support group meetings in 2008.
- We have begun to update our local
by-laws. The committee met in September
and feels that they have taken a chunk out of the task.
We will meet again after the next chapter
meeting to go over the changes that we made and to move forward with
the next
several sections.
- We have also organized a committee from TRIO,
consisting of our nurses to make a formal policy for our nursing
scholarship
that was started in memory of Babs Pfister.
We also want to set up a better way to advertise that it
is available to
our transplant nursing population for education purposes.
- We also voted at our last Board meeting to
obtain white collared polo looking shirts with the TRIO logo on them. The suggestion was made that when we are
volunteering in the communities, representing TRIO, that we would wear
these to
make us look more like a professional group.
- Many of our members are busy “beefing up” for
the transplant games next year. Our
bowling team has been practicing every other week since early spring. The golf team has been meeting all summer and
the volleyball group is busy organizing.
Team Pittsburgh
has been growing steadily in members since the announcement of the
games coming
here.
- Lastly, we are beginning to set up a
program
with the Family Houses so that if patients and/or their families would
like to
speak to someone regarding the transplant process, support or just to
develop a
relationship outside the sterile medical environment.
We will do this during the week so that the
shuttle can bring anyone who wants to participate between the various
houses.
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Have a
wonderful meeting
Respectfully
Submitted,
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Kathy
Jacobs
President
TRIP-Pittsburgh
Chapter