Gold Trustee Dr. Kimberly Manning is one of the many physicians who have cared for patients with compassion and empathy in the COVID-19 crisis. She has chronicled the challenges and joys in numerous publications and on her popular Twitter account, @gradydotor.
March 11, 2021, marks the one-year anniversary of the declaration of the COVID-19 global pandemic by the World Health Organization. More than 2.5 million people have died, including a half-million people in the United States. We think always of the lives lost to COVID-19 and of the incredible courage and compassion with which doctors, nurses, students, and all healthcare staff have cared for patients during these very hard 12 months.
With such compassion in mind, the Gold Foundation has created face masks with the phrase: “Behind this mask is a person who cares” alongside the Gold Foundation logo. We are still in the thick of the pandemic, and the importance of humanism in healthcare is made clear every single day.
The Arnold P. Gold Foundation is a nonprofit that champions the human connection in healthcare. Founded in 1988, the Gold Foundation spread the iconic White Coat Ceremony across medical schools and now nursing schools, emphasizing the importance of compassion at the start of training. The Gold Foundation also established the Gold Humanism Honor Society, which has more than 165 chapters, and programs like Thank a Resident Day, Tell Me More, and Solidarity Week.
Throughout Spring 2021, the Gold Foundation is inviting its community of healthcare team members, patients, families and supporters to join us in emphasizing how essential compassion and collaboration are — as critical as the scientific facts — to optimal healthcare.
Dr. Danielle Ofri has cared for patients in New York City during the COVID-19 crisis and chronicled the challenges, including in The New Yorker, “A Bellevue Doctor’s Pandemic Diary.”
We encourage advocates of humanism in healthcare to share their thoughts on its importance on social media and stories that illustrate humanism in action, and use the hashtag #humanismalways. Follow us and tag us (@GoldFdtn on Twitter and Instagram; look for the full The Arnold P. Gold Foundation on LinkedIn and Facebook) for more about this campaign.
Together, we will honor healthcare professionals and their great care, compassion, and courage — and the role that such compassion has lived in all of us in this difficult year. We have mailed out masks to some of our community and will be mailing more in the coming weeks. We also plan to have additional masks available in our forthcoming online store. If you’d like to be notified when the masks are available to buy, please fill out this form.
Many thanks to William Kassing for his generous donation, which allowed these masks and this humanism initiative to be possible. Our thanks also to Gold Trustee Dr. Kimberly Manning, who coined #humanismalways on her popular Twitter platform, @gradydoctor.
Please reach out to AVP, Communications, Brianne Alcala at balcala@gold-foundation.org if you have any questions or if you are a healthcare leader/author/celebrity with a big heart who would like to help us amplify the message of the importance of humanism even louder and farther.
Thank you for all for helping support humanism in healthcare!
