DONOR TRIBUTE
Medtronic honors those who contribute organs, tissue
People who donate their organs and tissue to help the living when they die allow workers at a Medtronic Spine distribution facility in Memphis to ship out tissue made from bone to support more than 25,000 surgeries a year.
The work can be even more personal when a colleague or a loved one dies tragically, becoming a donor not only to be honored, but to be remembered.
That was the case for Michael Higginbotham, a 33-year-old Medtronic employee who died in a November 2014 traffic crash.
Another worker, Shirley Holiday, made the decision to remove her 22-year-old son, Eugene Cox III, from life support and donate his organs. Her son was shot in the head in May 2012.
Focusing on serving patients is a standard practice in the medical device and health care industries. Focusing on the organ and tissue donors who make it possible to serve patients goes a step further.
Medtronic’s SpinalGraft Technologies Group days ago dedicated a donor garden where symbols including a tree, water and circles represent life and honor both the donors they know and don’t know.
A Medtronic facility that prepares, or manufactures, tissue in Eatontown, New Jersey, dedicated its donor garden last fall.
A survey cited in March by international staffing agency ProClinical found that employees in the medical-device industry have the highest commitment and loyalty, or engagement, to their work in the life sciences industry.
However, employee engagement isn’t the point of Medtronic’s donor garden, said Michael Sulek, senior quality systems director.
“We never had in our mind that here’s a way to engage people,” Sulek said. “What was driving this right from the start was, here’s a way to honor our donors; when you’re dealing with a donated gift of human tissue it just brings you closer to where it came from and how that’s going to be used.”
Miriam Estrano, a compliance audit manager who helped lead the donor garden effort, said the idea was a vision that had been around for quite a few years. But the tragic loss of Higginbotham accelerated the action to make the donor garden happen.
Holiday, 49, said she knows that her son’s heart went to someone in Philadelphia. She’s received Christmas cards — with the identity of organ recipients undisclosed — thankful for her son’s gift of life.
The experience has deepened her commitment at work, said Holiday, who puts together kits sent to hospitals and has worked for Medtronic for 15 years.
While the awareness of the need for donor organs and tissue is high at Medtronic, a persistent scarcity of donors nationally leaves more than 120,600 people in need of a lifesaving transplant, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing.
Lipman recommends that people who want to become donors sign up through online registries in their state. The websites are donatelifetn.org in Tennessee, donatelifearkansas.org in Arkansas and donatelifems.org in Mississippi.