Caregiver honored with record gift at Bridgeport Hospital

Bridgeport Hospital has received a $100,000 gift from an anonymous donor in of honor of Kevin Sprague, MD, of Milford, the emergency department physician who cared for the donor’s wife last fall. The gift was the largest in the two-year history of the Bridgeport Hospital Foundation’s Honor Your Caregiver program, which allows donors to recognize specific physicians, nurses and other hospital staff.

The donor preferred to withhold his name from public release, saying that the gift was intended to draw attention to his wife’s caregivers and not him.

“You attended professionally and with consideration to an elderly patient – my wife – and a half dozen concerned relatives,” said the donor in the letter to Dr. Sprague that accompanied his gift to the hospital. “Your diagnoses were right on. We brought my wife home in good shape.”

The $100,000 donation is nearly double the entire sum of the nearly 230 other gifts presented through the Honor Your Caregiver program since it was established in 2012.

“This gift is extraordinary, not only in its size but in that it recognizes the skill, dedication and service excellence of our Emergency Department staff,” said Bridgeport Hospital Foundation President Steve Jakab.

Chairman of Emergency Medicine Rockman Ferrigno, MD, agreed with Jakab that the record gift reflects the performance of the entire department. “Providing high-quality care requires a team effort,” he said. “Although it’s expressed in a variety of ways, patient and family satisfaction is what we strive for every day.”

For his part, Dr. Sprague said he was “truly flattered” that a patient would present such a sizable gift to the hospital in his honor. “Every single patient matters to us in the Emergency Department,” he said. “We don’t do our jobs for rewards or recognition, but appreciation expressed by patients helps validate all the years and hard work we put into our education and training to become healthcare professionals.”

Jakab said the average Honor Your Caregiver gift during the past year was about $350. “Every gift counts,” he said. “The fact that a patient or family member takes that extra step to thank a caregiver is itself a powerful expression of gratitude.”

For more information about the Honor Your Caregiver program at Bridgeport Hospital, visit foundation.bridgeporthospital.org.

About Bridgeport Hospital: Bridgeport Hospital is a private, not-for-profit acute care hospital located in Connecticut’s most populous city, primarily serving patients from Fairfield and New Haven Counties. Burn patients are seen in The Connecticut Burn Center—the only burn center in Connecticut—from throughout the state and neighboring states. A member of the Yale New Haven Health System, Bridgeport Hospital has 383 licensed beds plus 42 beds licensed under Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital, more than 2,600 employees, 700 active attending physicians representing more than 60 subspecialties, 235 medical/surgical residents and fellows in programs affiliated with Yale University School of Medicine, and more than 460 volunteers and 380 auxilians.