Congratulations to Kimberly Scott, our April Living the Mission Award winner! Kimberly works at Kettering Health Piqua.
The Living the Mission Award is given to people who bring Kettering Health’s mission to life, demonstrating the sacred work of improving the quality of life for people in the communities we serve. They use their own time and resources to transform lives, whether that’s in one of our facilities or out in the community.
Read Kimberly’s nomination story below.
“Kim brings a wealth of knowledge to the organization and patients we serve. Kim has prior experience working in pediatric loss and shared two processes that were beneficial to staff and families. They include providing a necklace and a teddy bear gift for families experiencing pediatric loss in the hospital setting. The necklace is a two-piece heart necklace where the inner heart remains with the child and the outer heart remains with the parent. The bear is through a free program that distributes bears so that the family does not have to leave the hospital empty-handed after losing their child. Kim advocated for us to implement these two kind gestures after a recent pediatric loss in the emergency department and informed me that she planned to purchase the necklaces on behalf of the ED so that we could have them available. Kim declined being reimbursed or splitting the cost. Kim is always finding ways to demonstrate how she is innovative, caring, compassionate, and competent. This is just one example of her generosity and kindness. Whenever we take up funds to sponsor families for Christmas or Thanksgiving, Kim always contributes a significant amount to help those in need.
Kim is a shining example of compassion for the communities we serve. Not having prior pediatric experience, many of us serving the Piqua community had no idea these were common gestures of kindness we could implement in hopes of easing the immense pain and suffering the family is experiencing. I believe these measures will help ease the pain of staff as well because one of the worst emotions/thoughts when dealing with pediatric death is that it’s so difficult to watch the family grieve and feel as if you aren’t doing enough to ease their pain. Hopefully the pocket of people this will serve will be small, but the impact will be tremendous and will provide a positive memory of their child that will last them a lifetime.”