Joel Grey Hosts Visiting Nurse Service of New York Gala Today

Over a century since public health pioneer Lillian Wald first provided charitable care for a mother and her baby on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the organization that she founded, the Visiting Nurse Service of New York (VNSNY), will once again celebrate Wald's efforts and the work of thousands of nurses and other dedicated VNSNY health professionals who have followed in her caring footsteps through today.

The Visiting Nurse Service of New York annual benefit will be held today, November 13, 2014, at The Waldorf Astoria Hotel. This year's event will honor Douglas D. Broadwater, Retired Partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, and Member and Former Chair of the Board at VNSNY, and Tara I. Stacom, Executive Vice Chairman at Cushman & Wakefield, Inc., with the Lillian D. Wald Award.

Renowned entertainer Joel Grey will serve as the Master of Ceremonies for the evening, which will include a special performance by The Children's Aid Society Chorus.

Proceeds support VNSNY's Children and Family Services (CFS) programs, which each year provide direct care and specialized support services to 9,000 children and their families, making VNSNY one of the largest and most innovative providers of home- and community-based services to children and families in the New York metropolitan area and in the United States. Donations help provide home health care for children from infancy to 18 years of age, and support programs for first-time, low-income mothers, fathers and their babies, in addition to initiatives focused on pediatric diabetes care and pediatric palliative care.

The benefit helps to support a range of maternal and pediatric programs, including:

• VNSNY's Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP) program, in partnership with the NYC Department of Health, is an evidence-based community health program that pairs a specially trained nurse with a high-risk, first-time mother from pregnancy until the child's second birthday. Nurses work with new mothers to help them overcome incredible obstacles, including poverty, instability, mental illness, and abuse, while teaching them to become loving, knowledgeable parents. The evidence-based program model has been shown to create better parents and raise healthy babies by reducing childhood injuries and unintended pregnancies, increasing father involvement and women's employment, and increasing children's readiness for school. VNSNY NFP, in partnership with the City of New York Department of Health, has made the NFP a mainstay in its effort to reduce health disparities, improve maternal and infant health outcomes and enhance socioeconomic status. In 2014, we were able to expand the NFP program to provide services to new mothers and babies in Nassau County.
• The Pediatric Diabetes Program provides care management services to children with Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes. First targeting the Bronx and Manhattan, the program focuses on diabetes education, self-management, and behavior modification. The program, which expanded into Brooklyn in 2014, uses an interdisciplinary approach to care providing home visits by a nurse, nutritionist, certified diabetes educator and social worker to the child and family living with diabetes. The program's goal is to reduce hospitalizations, decrease high blood-sugar levels and improve on targeted psycho-social indicators and overall health.
• The Pediatric Palliative Care Program focuses on children with life-threatening and life-limiting illnesses. VNSNY's program, currently operating in Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, and Nassau, emulates evidence-based best practices to deliver a comprehensive palliative care service, including: pain and symptom management; reduction of hospitalizations/ER utilization; holistic care to the patient's family; and patient and family empowerment around sensitive medical and social issues centered on the child's illness. Service components include nursing expertise, medical care, social work, rehabilitation services, child life specialist, and bereavement counseling, in addition to case management and care coordination. The key goal is to manage a child's pain and symptoms, and provide support to family members while allowing the patient to pursue curative treatments.
• The Early Steps Family Center operates a comprehensive parent and child development center in the Rockaway catchment area that offers families access to programs including Early Head Start, Head Start and the Fathers First Initiative. The center had a grand reopening in a new and improved building in June after being displaced by Hurricane Sandy. Despite the widespread devastation, staff remained undeterred and continued to provide care within a home-based model. The newly leased building in Rockaway will allow VNSNY to serve 185 children and their families with a range of services that encourage both age-appropriate learning and strong parental involvement on both a prenatal and postpartum level. The Early Head Start program serves 75 children, 0-3 years of age, including pregnant and parenting teens, and their children. The new Head Start Program works with the NYC Department of Education to provide on-site services promoting health and wellness and school readiness to 110 preschoolers. In addition to these programs, the center offers an on-site GED program and the Father's First Initiative.

In 1893, the Lower East Side of Manhattan had the densest population in the world with 1,000 people per acre. Most of the residents were impoverished immigrants who had come to America from Europe with little more than their dreams. They had settled on the Lower East Side of Manhattan with others who shared their cultural backgrounds - people who spoke the same languages, ate the same foods. Many of the immigrants lived in tenements and worked in gruesome sweatshops where the hours were long, the work hard, and the wages pitiful. Sickness was rampant. Because many of the sick could not afford to leave their jobs or their families in order to be hospitalized, 90% of the ill lived at home.

Down on Henry Street, Lillian Wald, a New York Hospital nursing graduate, was teaching a course to immigrant women on home care and hygiene. One morning a little girl - the daughter of one of Wald's students - came into the classroom, weeping.

"My mother is sick," she said.

Lillian Wald followed the child back to her family's cramped tenement apartment. The girl's young mother lay in a dirty bed soaked with blood. She had been hemorrhaging since giving birth two days earlier. Wald sprang into action. She ministered care to the woman, cleaned up her bed and room, and comforted the family. This event changed Lillian Wald's life and eventually gave birth to the Visiting Nurse Service of New York.

Visiting Nurse Service of New York, the largest certified not-for-profit home health care organization in the nation, has more than a century of experience in serving the health care needs of New York City's diverse population. Today, the agency has more than 65,000 patients and health plan members under its direct and coordinated care on any given day, ranging from newborn infants to our eldest seniors. In 2013, VNSNY provided $30.3 million in charitable care and community services, including direct care for thousands of uninsured and underinsured New Yorkers who had nowhere else to turn.