I initially meant to write this post after I finished work on Thursday, but I was in Vermont without internet access until today. When I left the hospital on Thursday, our group had just raised a total of $100,000 since they began keeping track of the funds. This momentous occasion will hopefully help us win a hospital-wide award for innovation of medical care at HUP. If we do win, I will get to come back and accept the award with the other volunteers and Trish. This would be extremely significant because it would make the work public, that we have been doing. Then all of the other divisions at the hospital could adopt our system and begin having volunteers raise money.

I spent my last few days transferring my patients over to other volunteers and educating them about each individual patient’s needs. One of the problems with my leaving is that I had taken on a large number of patients that now have to be given to other volunteers. There are only a few other people who work with Trish and this will greatly increase their weekly workload. I wish that I could have stayed longer and made my volunteer work a permanent job.

Throughout these four weeks, I devoted most of my life to my Senior Project. In total, I helped to raise $62,958.50 with another $11,000 still pending. As the pending funds are processed by the foundations and approved in the coming weeks, my grand total will probably approach $70,000. With another volunteer, Nancy, I established a qualitative survey that will allow the patients that we help to assess our care and make our system of getting funds more beneficial to the patients. Now here are some data that I totaled this weekend:  I worked 154 hours and spent 33 hours in transit to and from work. I rode the Media/ Elwyn SEPTA train a total of 38 times. The most alarming statistic in my opinion is how much caffeine I drank; I drank over 8,000 mg of caffeine.

This was a difficult, but very manageable four weeks. While I have to admit that I chose to do this project for some selfish reasons (medical contacts around the country, hospital experience and a résumé booster), I found the altruistic work helped put life in perspective. It is our civil duty to help all of the people who are in a worse situation than we are. Anyone who finds my project interesting should contact me about it. It made a huge difference for a large number patients.

-Matt