About Patient Experience Week
Patient Experience Week is an annual event to celebrate healthcare staff impacting patient experience every day. This celebratory week provides a focused time for Valley Children's to celebrate accomplishments, re-energize efforts and honor the people who impact patient experience every day. From nurses and physicians, to support staff and executive professionals, to patients, families and communities served, we are all the patient experience.
In life, we are faced with moments that either break us or define us. For me, that defining moment came as a mom, when maternal-fetal medicine specialist Dr. Beni Adeniji, a man I have come to greatly respect and trust, told me and my husband that he had a concern about one of our unborn twins and wanted me to be seen by a cardiologist. Little did I know, that defining moment would lead to several others, as my husband and I began to navigate the possibilities of the health conditions our daughter may come to face. Through all of this, one thing remained: the absolutely incredible, unwavering support from our team at Valley Children’s. And I use the word “our” very intentionally. I chose “our” instead of “the” because that is how we were made to feel, that everyone was in our corner, that they were there for us. They made “our” team.
Being able to share our story and how we lived through these unimaginable, defining moments is what Patient Experience Week is all about to me. The ability to possibly offer some semblance of a shred of hope for parents who are facing these same struggles and utter terror of the unknown, is what makes this something powerful.
Having the opportunity to share with our team all that they were – and all that they still are – to us is the most important thing about Patient Experience Week for me. I want everyone who supported us to know they made a difference. That the security department knows they made an impact on us by making sure we were settled in and the motorhome was hooked up, giving us a place for our daughter’s twin brother to stay close to all of us, to the Ronald McDonald House making sure we knew we were welcome to come up for a meal and reprieve if we ever needed their services, to the pharmaceutical department in the NICU and then in the PICU, to the medical team in the OR, to the surgeons, doctors, and then finally, to our angels here on earth, our PICU nurses: Peaches, Joel, Deep and Dave. We could never put into words the gratitude we have for you all. And there might not ever be the right time, but Patient Experience Week gives us the opportunity to share this with everyone, with our team, to let them know that to them, they may just be doing their job, but to us, they make the impossible possible.
Valley Children’s Hospital will forever hold a piece of my family’s heart, as they are the reason I am a mommy of five beautiful children and not four. This was not possible because of the care and passion of one person. It was a collective effort by everyone. It is because of our team.
With all the love in our hearts,
Team Torres: Amanda, Rey, Avery, Hudson, Atticus, Zander and Trinity