Individual grants have been provided to recipients and their caregivers for parking fees, gas cards for transportation costs, telephone / cell gift cards, utilities including fuel, electric and more.
Donations for assistance have been made to individuals through the Stepping Stones Transplant Fund at Johns Hopkins Comprehensive Transplant Center, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Spirit of Life Fund, the Medical University of South Carolina Health Transplant Center, the University of Maryland Medical Center Division of Transplantation, the Gift of Life Family House and many more. Through these donations assistance has been provided in the following ways:
Stepping Stones Transplant Fund/Johns Hopkins Medical Center
-purchase gas cards for a lung transplant patient, 2 liver transplant patients and 2 kidney transplant patients to assist with the cost of getting to clinic.
-purchasing gas cards and parking coupons for the family of a liver transplant patient who ended up being quite ill in the ICU with a complication following transplant. This brought a lot of additional financial burden to the family, who already had limited resources. We were able to give them gas cards and parking coupons – which gave them parking in the garage here for 20 days.
-assisting toward the cost of paying one month of a patient’s insurance premium while awaiting assistance from a program that would assist with this on a more long term basis. The program takes a little while to get in effect, so our assistance prevented the patient from losing coverage.
University of Maryland Medical Center
Many patients come from outside of the area and are on limited income secondary to their illness. We help these patients with costs for long-term parking and gas.
- We have assisted several transplant patients with a mortgage payment to avoid default. Again, finances may become strained secondary to inability to work or work full-time.
- Recently, we helped a middle-age transplant patient with the expense of being evaluated for new dentures. She had been losing weight secondary to a very old and ill-fitting pair of dentures.
- We helped a widow of a recently deceased patient with his funeral expenses. The patient had been quite ill for some time. His widow was the "bread-winner" for this family which also included 2 young daughters to raise. The patient had minimal life insurance benefits. All family members were in another country and much too poor to assist.
