A annual event to give thanks to health-care professionals around the province with festive popcorn packages recently made stops at Surrey and White Rock hospitals.
Operation Popcorn is a B.C.-wide event where volunteers from BC Transplant visit hospitals to show their gratitude towards health-care workers for their work in organ donation and transplant. The volunteer groups visited Surrey Memorial and Peace Arch hospitals on Wednesday (Dec. 4).
“Health-care teams on the organ donation side often have limited contact with transplant recipients, and those who work with transplant recipients don’t usually interact with organ donors and donor families,” BC Transplant’s executive director Eric Lun explained in a news release.
“When they meet our volunteers at the Operation Popcorn deliveries, it is a powerful affirmation of the power of the gift of life.”
The teams that visit the hospitals consist of living donors, families of deceased donors and transplant recipients and others. This holiday season, they delivered a total of 150 boxes of popcorn to health-care teams at 28 sites.
This year marks the 33rd for the volunteer group to show their thanks, with the organization having exceeded 11,000 transplants that they've helped complete.
“This milestone truly demonstrates our collective commitment to honour the end-of-life wishes of organ donors and their families, and save lives through transplants,” said Josie Osborne, minister of health.
“BC Transplant’s Operation Popcorn campaign is such a positive way to shed a light on their collective efforts while raising public awareness about the positive impacts of organ donation, and I offer my deepest gratitude to all our health-care professionals involved in organ donation and transplants.”
BC Transplant is encouraging residents to give some time to thought and conversation about organ-donation wishes with their families, to be prepared. There are currently more than 600 B.C. residents waiting for an organ transplant. For more information, visit transplant.bc.ca
