Bricks Tie Hospital to Patients

By Melissa McGrath, The Idaho Statesman, Boise, The Idaho Statesman, Boise

Dec. 29–It happened about six years ago, but Cindy Hall still gets choked up every time she talks about it.

Her son Sam, now 7, was born with a cleft palate. When he was 18 months old, Sam had to undergo surgery to fix the cleft palate, and the Hall family ended up spending eight days in the pediatric intensive care unit at St. Luke’s Regional Medical Center in Boise.

“They were so good about everything,” Hall said about the PICU staff.

“Every morning when I came in, (one nurse) had a pretty little blanket underneath him and combed his hair,” Hall added, remembering back to her son’s time in the PICU. “It’s the little things that are really important to me.”

To thank them, she wrote a letter to Ed Dahlberg, the head of St. Luke’s, but it still didn’t seem like enough. So when St. Luke’s started its brick campaign this summer, Hall, who now works at St. Luke’s Meridian hospital, immediately ordered a brick and inscribed it with a message: “For PICU staff for exceptional care. Samuel Hall.”

Hall’s story is just one of the many memories lining the plaza outside St. Luke’s downtown hospital.

The inscribed bricks are part of St. Luke’s brick campaign, a fund-raiser that lets people buy bricks for $100 each and print personal messages on them before they are placed in the plaza.

St. Luke’s plaza, which connects the main hospital with the South Tower and Center for Breast Imaging, is an area filled with walkways, gardens and benches just outside the main entrance.

The proceeds from the bricks will go to the hospital, which has raised more than $20,000 so far through this campaign. The brick campaign is ongoing, and it could continue for years because the foundation has not set an end date yet.

“It’s a win-win,” said Camille Ramsey, directory of annual giving for the St. Luke’s Health Foundation, which organized the brick campaign. “It’s a way for people to support their community hospital, support St. Luke’s while at the same time honoring those who they love.”

Ramsey came up with the idea for the campaign.

“One day I was sitting with the architect, and I looked at the plans (for the plaza) and thought, ‘Look at all of these bricks where patients and staff spend a lot of their time,’” she said.

St. Luke’s plaza, which opened this summer, has roughly 13,000 bricks.

An estimated 300 bricks have been sold so far, and about half of those have been placed in the plaza. The others will be placed soon, Ramsey said.

Soon after launching the brick fund-raiser this summer, the foundation expanded the campaign to include other items in the plaza, like the green benches and black lampposts. All of these items are available for people to buy and inscribe with a message.

The “Healing Labyrinth,” which is a maze-like concrete display in the plaza, is also available, Ramsey said. Boise-based Washington Group International, a global contracting company, bought the naming rights for the entire plaza and plaques with the company’s name are at the two entrances to the plaza.

Ramsey returns to the plaza often to see how the bricks look and to “reflect,” she said.

“I love to go out there and look at those bricks and imagine the stories behind them,” Ramsey said. “There are bricks out there that clearly have secret messages and hidden messages to those who they are for, and there are some there for their family.”

Another brick placed just outside the door of the Anderson Center in the South Tower reads: “Baratcart family. Love, Learn, Leave a Legacy.”

Lisa Baratcart, who works in the Anderson Center, bought that brick earlier this fall for her entire family. The Anderson Center holds continuing education courses for the hospital staff and birthing and parenting classes for the community.

She saw a similar motto in a video that was played at a conference she attended a few years ago.

“I just thought that was a wonderful thing to live by,” said Baratcart. And she said she is always looking for a way to give back to the hospital.

Baratcart said she’ll eventually buy a brick for each of her children. They’ll make great birthday gifts, she said.

“I want the saying for my children to be something they can connect with. I might even ask them what they want to say,” Baratcart said. “Then they can walk through the plaza and say, ‘There is my name.’”

Joan John hopes at least some of the people walking through St. Luke’s plaza will stop to look at the brick she bought to honor her mother. The brick reads: “Ida R. Lewis, RN. Cared for 23,000 babies 1952-1972.”

“I hope a few of them remember her,” John said. “It was kind of hard to get all that information in three little lines so I hope that’s enough to describe what she was — a dedicated nurse for that many years in the same department.”

Lewis died in August at age 93, John said. John had brought the brick just before her mother’s death.

“I thought it’d be a nice way to memorialize her,” John said.

Other bricks in the plaza display people’s names, family names, birth dates and personal dedications.

Ramsey doesn’t expect all 13,000 bricks to sell anytime soon or even in the future, and the foundation isn’t setting any quotas, she said.

“I haven’t put a number goal (on the campaign), but our goal is to just provide support — charitable support — to various projects and programs that help distinguish St. Luke’s from any other hospital,” Ramsey said.

The foundation has thought about expanding the campaign to sell bricks at the Meridian hospital and Mountain States Tumor Institute clinics, but nothing has been finalized, she said.

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Copyright (c) 2005, The Idaho Statesman, Boise

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