About this time of year, many school-age children have one thing in common: they are making their parents crazy. A combination of mid-summer heat (or monsoons – take your pick), a declining number of organized activities and general listlessness leads to the well known distress call of bored kids:  “There’s nothing to do.” 

The answer might be to send your kid to the hospital. 

Not for treatment, but for opportunities. Hospitals are always looking for volunteers and many have very active “volun-teen” programs. There are many pluses to hospital volunteering, particularly the lessons it teaches in responsibility, compassion and community.  These lessons are valuable whether or not the young person is considering a health care career, though one of the biggest benefits of hospital volunteering is the chance to work with health care professionals. 

Most of the time in volun-teen programs, there is a minimum age requirement (typically around 14 years old). But with some guidance and a little creativity, children of all ages can find a way to get busy by giving to their hospitals.  For example, a pair of young girls in Anamosa raised $350 at their lemonade stand that paid for a stove for Jones Regional Medical Center’s rehabilitation therapy department.  The stove helps injured patients learn to function in their homes again. 

Students in Panora made and donated more than 100 blankets to Mercy Medical Center in Des Moines.  The blankets will be used in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit. 

Players from the Chariton High School girls’ softball team made one of their home games this summer an “all-pink” event and raised $2,700 for Lucas County Health Center’s free mammogram fund.  Each of the team’s players and coaches donated a handmade item that was auctioned off for the fund, including a quilt that was stitched by the team’s senior class. 

And in Newton, two boys celebrated their recent birthdays in typical fashion: by having a party and collecting gifts.  But instead of asking for presents for themselves, they requested that their party guests bring new and used DVDs, which were then donated to Skiff Medical Center for sick and injured children and their families to enjoy during their hospital stays. More than 30 DVDs were collected. 

Talk to your local hospital. You might just find out that instead of making you crazy, your kids will make you proud this summer.

It was great to see both good people and good things in Iowa celebrated as front-page news this week. 

The subject was volunteerism in America and the big news was Iowa ranking second in the nation, with almost 40 percent of Iowans providing volunteer time.  Only Utah, at 44 percent, ranked higher.  The source of all this is the Corporation for National and Community Service, a program of the federal government that promotes and provides information about volunteering, and the results of its Volunteering in America survey and report.

Individual Iowa communities were also leaders, with Iowa City (second), Des Moines (sixth) and Cedar Rapids (15^th) among the top mid-sized cities.  This is significant, because one of the more interesting facts from the data is that the smaller the community, the more people tend to volunteer.  So the competition among the mid-sized cities was particularly strong. 

Hospitals, of course, provide a huge opportunity for anyone who wants to serve their community. Keeping in mind that the vast majority of Iowa hospitals are small (fewer than 25 beds), Regional Health Services of Howard County in Cresco is a typical example, with a corps of 85 active volunteers. That main group is supplemented by many others who contribute time, particularly to the hospitals hugely successful quilt auction.  All told, the hospital benefits from more than 27,600 hours of volunteer service.  Similarly, a group of about 70 volunteers at Wright Medical Center in Clarion donated more than 6,700 hours to the hospital. 

Iowa City’s high ranking certainly has something to do with the two hospitals there. University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics has about 1,200 volunteers, many of them full-time college students, who put in 98,000 hours of service.  At Mercy Iowa City, 440 volunteers contribute about 26,000 hours a year. 

Hospital volunteers are also energetic fundraisers who often run the hospital gift shops.  That revenue, along with separate fundraising efforts by the volunteers, provides money to buy new equipment and make other improvements. For example, at Mary Greeley Medical Center (MGMC) in Ames, one of the auxiliary’s special projects is to update the hospital guest house, which provides nearby lodging for families of MGMC patients.  Volunteers also help fund hundreds of scholarships given by their hospitals (and IHA) each year. 

And though it is difficult to quantify because, like most businesses, Iowa hospitals don’t formally track employee volunteer time, IHA firmly believes Iowa hospitals give as good as they get when it comes to volunteering.  This anecdotal example is likely very typical: 

Last summer, employees at St. Luke’s Hospital in Cedar Rapids committed to fill every slot for one week of work on the local Habitat for Humanity project, and they did it – 30 slots, eight hours a day for five straight days.  The response was so great and the Habitat people were so pleased that the St. Luke’s employees have pledged to do it again this year.