The Danny Harris fan club has probably added several thousand more members recently, as the janitor at St. Luke’s Health System in Sioux City led the Des Moines Register’s lifestyle section a while back.  As the article notes, IHA recognized Danny as an Iowa Hospital Hero at the IHA Annual Meeting last October.

The article also notes that Danny is the first janitor to win the award, which IHA started three years ago.  But several other non-clinical staff have received the award, including a hospital van driver who saved a woman who had collapsed in her home and a groundskeeper who donated a kidney to a co-worker she barely knew.

What all of IHA’s Hospital Heroes have had in common is an uncommon commitment to their work and their communities, and that is clear throughout the profile on Danny:

He can tell you he came to Sioux City in 1966 to work at a laundry, then got a laundry job at St. Luke’s in 1971. By the next year, he advanced to cleaning floors.

Twenty years later, he started cleaning the surgery floor.

“The other guy got caught sleeping,” he said. “They put him in the kitchen.”

Such behavior makes Danny shake his head. He doesn’t like lazy people. Or people that make a mess, he said while cleaning up the lounge.

What’s really gratifying about a story like this is that there are countless people like Danny Harris among Iowa’s 70,000 hospital employees.  That’s why IHA is excited to see who will be nominated as Iowa Hospital Heroes in 2010.