• Special delivery: MGHer crochets hats for newborns
  While many expectant parents spend time carefully selecting the clothes their newborns will wear home from the hospital, babies born at the MGH have been receiving a special addition to their first outfits, thanks to one MGH employee. James Taylor of the MGH Blood Labs crochets tiny hats for these babies, a hobby he first started in 1997.

• MGH Disabilities Awareness Day: Focus on resources
  The MGH Council on Disabilities Awareness (CDA) hosted the MGH's first-ever Disabilities Awareness Day Feb. 28 to showcase the hospital's resources for patients, families, visitors and employees living with disabilities.

• Plain language: Key to understanding health information
  Understanding health information is a right of all patients, and making written materials more clear is the responsibility of all health care organizations. One way to do this is to use a writing technique called plain language, which has been adopted by many federal government agencies, law firms, private sector companies and health care organizations.

• MGHers work toward meeting National Patient Safety Goals
  While there is a nationwide focus to improve the standards of patient safety measures in hospitals around the country, the MGH has been concerned about and working to improve patient safety for a long time. Like many hospitals, the MGH is part of an ongoing effort to achieve the requirements described by the National Patient Safety Goals (NPSGs), established by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO). These measures are meant to bring focus to patient safety priorities at all health care organizations and give national attention to finding better ways to protect patients.

• Keeping connected with MGHers
  Joan Connerty, RN, of Internal Medical Associates, has known Peter L. Slavin, MD, president of the MGH, for more than 20 years. So Connerty was not surprised when she recently received an e-mail invitation to join Slavin and a group of 10 other MGHers for a monthly luncheon he hosts to provide a forum for staff to discuss ideas, concerns and general feelings about the hospital and its operations. In return, these lunches give Slavin an opportunity to hear firsthand about what is going on throughout the hospital and have a dialogue with employees about issues.

• Pediatric MS Center named a Center of Excellence
  The National Multiple Sclerosis (MS) Society recently honored the Partners Pediatric
  MS Center at the MGH as one of six Pediatric MS Centers of Excellence. The centers will join together to form a first-of-its-kind collaborative network of hospital-based pediatric MS programs to provide children with MS and related diseases with the best possible medical, emotional, social and mental support. As a Center of Excellence, the Partners program also will receive a nearly $1.6 million grant over five years to support its current activities and future research.

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• What's Happening

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