Inspiration at Walter Reed
Posted by Travis, President of Griffin York & Krause
At GY&K we’re lucky to work with a number of health care clients and one of the many benefits of this work is that you in some way feel like you’re helping those who in a very real way are helping others. Recently we began working with the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center (DVBIC). DVBIC’s mission is to serve active duty military, their dependents and veterans with traumatic brain injury (TBI). The organization was mandated by Congress in 1991 and is funded through the Department of Defense.
I have to say that although we are only in the beginning stages of our work to redesign their Web site and help them better communicate about the highly important work they do, everyone on our team has been genuinely and deeply impacted in the brief period we’ve worked with them.
DVBIC is headquartered in Washington, DC at Walter Reed Army Medical Center where we had our kick-off meeting last week.
As he walked us into the building, the historical significance of the facility and importance of what goes on there became quite apparent. Unites States flags and photographs of military leaders over the last century lined the entry way. Service members in uniform (Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines) and their families were bustling around getting treatment and/or working at the facility.
Many of the wounded soldiers from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan get sent back to the United States through Germany and then to Walter Reed.
As we walked through the halls, we were taken to the Military Advanced Training Center serving “Warriors in Transition.” This was a 31,000 square foot state-of-the-art facility filled with dozens of service members all actively working out, showing signs of hope and optimism and, surprising to me, determined to get back to the Middle East and finish what they had set out to do. The fact that the patients in Walter Reed are there because they were injured fighting for our freedom added an element of emotion to this particular tour.
The morale in the facility gave me a different perspective and sense of pride that people in the United States are willing to fight for us.
It will not be hard for our team to be passionate about the redesign and development of the DVBIC Web site. We will take a lot of pride in the work, which has significance on an international level for service members and veterans with TBI, their family members and caregivers, and their healthcare professionals.
The reality is that a growing number of soldiers are returning with some level of brain injury, the most serious of which can have long-term if not lifelong effects on memory and daily activities that many of us take for granted. To learn more about DVBIC’s work and TBI go to http://www.dvbic.org.
A former colleague of mine used to joke about marketers and say “we’re not saving lives here.”
True, but the people we work for are.
Tags: Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center, traumatic brain injury, Walter Reed Army Medical Center
This entry was posted on Monday, December 22nd, 2008 at 11:28 am and is filed under Feature Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
