SPECIAL SECTION: HEALTH CARE HEROES

Recognizing outstanding achievements in health care

Here's what just about all of our Health Care Heroes honorees said to us this year: "This award should go to my team, or all my colleagues, not just to me." So here we are, with our second annual Health Care Heroes award, in which we seek to personify recognition for the essential things that health care professionals do day in and day out.

Our region is rich in health care heroism, as exemplified by Nobel Laureate Craig Mello of the University of Massachusetts Medical School, whose scientific inquiry led to the discovery of new ways to fight cancer. But there's also heroism in the daily concerns of the patient advocate who reassures people waiting in an inner-city ER; the neonatal intensive care unit nurse who supports bereaved parents; and the health administrator who watches frail elders closely to prevent them from getting sick.

This special section of the Worcester Business Journal recognizes a group of people – and their organizations – who make a difference in our lives. They are our 2007 Health Care Heroes, and they take care of our physical well-being and, often, our emotional health as well.

Our honorees include: a company whose groundbreaking technology has contributed significantly to the improvement in women's health worldwide; a regional organization advocating for patients' wishes at the end of life; two doctors whose careers in emergency medicine and critical care have served as national models; and nurses whose outside-the-mainstream work improves the well-being of thousands each year.

We began in March to solicit nominations in several health care categories. With the help of a respected panel of outside judges – who volunteered for the second year in a row to guide us in the selection process – we chose our 2007 Health Care Heroes. You can read their stories on the following pages.

Congratulations to this year's Health Care Heroes award winners. As they themselves insist, they represent tens of thousands of others like them, who serve this region unselfishly, day in and day out.

PHYSICIANS

Dr. Richard Aghababian: A master of emergency medicine

David Kaufman: Intensity in the ICU

NURSES

Susan Gonzales: Giving people a chance to do their best

Anne Marie Kaune: Providing health care to the city's homeless

Cheryl Killoran: On behalf of the most fragile patients

COMMUNITY SERVICE

Christine McCluskey: Compassion helps find a Better Ending

Joyce Cooney & Jane Gauthier: Oral health to overall health

Joanne Raymond: Personal loss translates to international effort to help

Dr. Brian Thamel & Dr. Valarie Ricciardi: For husband-wife team, seeing is believing