philanthropy
Foundation
THE FOR AN “AMAZING HOSPITAL” Chris & Dr. Kirk Voelker By Sylvia Whitman | Photo by Nancy Guth
Dr. Kirk Voelker and his wife, Chris, give their time and treasure to the Sarasota Memorial Healthcare Foundation (SMHF). As its website states, “during the past four decades, the Healthcare Foundation has provided meaningful grants to enhance patient care, facilities, technology and support ongoing clinical education and medical research.” Kirk says, “How can you not support the Healthcare Foundation and everything that it’s bringing to the community?” Kirk grew up in Sarasota, attended medical school at UF, and headed to the University of California Irvine for a fellowship in pulmonary disease and critical care medicine. In 1996, he returned to Sarasota with Chris, a Los Angelena and corporate event planner who traveled the globe. She had her doubts about small city life. “I brought her back to Sarasota kicking and screaming,” Kirk jokes. Kirk’s pulmonary practice kept him busy at Sarasota Memorial Hospital, where he marveled at the difference the Sarasota Memorial Healthcare Foundation had made both in the institution and in his hometown as a whole. “It helps provide technology and programs that few community hospitals have—because they’re outside of the scope of the budget of a normal community hospital,” he says. “That technology and support attract world-class physicians, which just improves health care in the community. That’s the full circle. We have very talented physicians who come from cuttingedge training programs or hospitals, and we’re able to supply the tools that they need to continue doing that cutting-edge work.” 42
SARASOTA SCENE | JUNE 2019
Almost seven years ago, SMHF tapped Kirk to serve as a trustee and chair the grants committee. He accepted without hesitation. “I had the unique perspective of not only seeing from a physician’s standpoint the good that the Healthcare Foundation does, but also being involved with decision making and evaluating the grants.” What the Healthcare Foundation looks to fund, says Kirk, is “technology or innovative programs that wouldn’t otherwise be available.” For example, SMH critical care physicians requested an ECMO machine—extracorporeal membrane oxidation—for the intensive care unit. Usually surgeons employ an ECMO in the operating room during cardio-bypass surgery. But the ICU doctors believed that a portable ECMO, used at bedside, could help their sickest patients by temporarily taking over heart and lung functions. The Healthcare Foundation found the proposal compelling and funded the purchase of an ECMO for the ICU. Last flu season, says Voelker, when traditional ventilators could not sustain several patients, doctors turned to the ECMO—and saved them. “They would have died. Young people in their 30s, 40s, and 50s would have died,” says Voelker. He also points to a cardiac patient whose “heart was stunned to the point where it couldn’t pump.” Traditional pump and ventilator protocols failed him, says Voelker, but “we were able to put him on this heart-lung bypass machine in the intensive care unit, and he literally walked out of the hospital 10 days later.”
