Kaiser Permanente Team Builds Prosthetic Hands for Charity

More than 120 members of the national Kaiser Permanente HealthConnect^TM team donated 60 prosthetic hands to victims of landmine accidents on March 10. In partnership with Odyssey Helping Hands, an organization devoted to facilitating philanthropic team building, a four-hour workshop was held in which Kaiser Permanente participants were challenged to assemble new, highly functional prosthetic hands for distribution to children in developing nations who have lost limbs as a result of landmine explosions.

The idea to participate came about when leaders were planning a meeting for the national KP HealthConnect^TM team, a civilian electronic health records project. Searching for an unconventional way to build camaraderie among employees and find more effective ways of delivering services to their customers, Lisa Caplan, vice president of the KP HealthConnect business team, also hoped to produce something that could be returned to the community and provide aid to those in need.

"It is so easy to lose sight of the importance of what we do here at Kaiser Permanente, and I felt that the exercise with Odyssey Helping Hands would really bring that point home and resonate with the KP HealthConnect team members," Caplan said. "I also wanted to make sure that we did something meaningful and tangible so everyone could walk away knowing they changed people's lives during the course of what would normally be a typical meeting or workday."

The workshop combined curriculum, activities, and keynote addresses with the cooperative problem-solving exercise of actually assembling the prosthetics. "It is an amazing experience to see the looks on people's faces when they realize that they are building something that will allow amputees to do things that we take for granted every day, such as writing, typing, and even eating with standard utensils," said John Arntz, a facilitator of the workshop. "Participants can then apply the lessons learned to their personal work environments with a newfound appreciation of their support systems and the end result of their work."

The activity allowed participants to deliver what would typically cost thousands of dollars to recipients free of charge. The United Nations estimates that there are 100 million active landmines in 60 countries, and 250 million more that are stockpiled and ready to deploy. There are approximately 2,000 landmine accidents every month, with 75 percent of mine blast survivors injured to a degree that requires at least one amputation.