Some have delivered babies in parking lots. Some have attended patients in the final hours of life. Collectively, they help maintain our health, help restore our health, and help safeguard our health by teaching us how to prevent illness and injury. Most are career professionals, some are volunteers, some fill vital support roles in a system of health care often described as the finest in the world.
Now they have this in common: All 21 of these exceptional people are Ingram’s Heroes in Healthcare for 2011. They join an elite club of previous years’ winners, all of whom have demonstrated the kind of commitment, competence and compassion that define the best of what our health-care system has to offer.
Across the full range of health-care careers, this year’s honorees again represent the fields of administration, professional staff, nursing, auxiliary services and volunteers. A special designation each year falls on our Lifetime Achievement winners, people who have demonstrated lifelong commitment to the health-care cause.
Also in this section, meet the team and individual winners of the Fittest Executives and Fittest Companies Challenge, bigger and better in its second year. Some will tell you how they stay in peak condition; others will talk about the dramatic health-score improvements they realized in the program.
We knew we’d have to look far and wide to find someone capable of following Patch Adams as a keynote speaker, but we’ve done it: Chris Crowley, co-author of “Younger Next Year,” will be the special guest speaker at Ingram’s Heroes in Health awards breakfast on April 1 at the Downtown Marriott.
Crowley is in peak physical condition for a man of 75, and he believes millions of other seniors are missing out on a better life. A successful lawyer who says he retired too early when he was 57, he came to realize that his physiological age exceeded his actual years, and set out to do something about it. That turnaround in his own health led to “Younger Next Year” and other works that have sold more than 1 million copies and have been translated into 20 languages.
For the past decade, Chris Crowley has been at the vanguard of a national revolution in aging. Don’t miss his spot-on message, encouraging seniors to make the most of their golden years with a common-sense approach to fitness and diet. We salute all of this year’s honorees for their efforts to improve the health of citizens throughout our region.
