Continuing with The Thunderbirds In the Community Conversations, last year’s WM Phoenix Open tournament chairman Tim Woods held a virtual discussion with Dr. Wayne Franklin, accomplished cardiovascular surgeon, Co-Director of Phoenix Children’s Heart Center and Director of Adult Congenital Heart Disease at Phoenix Children’s Hospital (PCH). The two leaders discussed healthcare challenges surrounding the current pandemic and how PCH modified its operations to stay safe while providing world-class healthcare here in the Valley of the Sun.

The Thunderbirds – hosts of the Waste Management Phoenix Open – and PCH have a long-standing friendship. To date, The Thunderbirds have provided more than $2.6 million in donations to PCH from monies raised from the popular golf event including a $500,000 donation in 2015 and a $400,000 donation in 2019 which was used to double the size of the hospital’s cardiovascular intensive care unit and fund new, state-of-the-art equipment.

Dr. Franklin spoke about how COVID-19 has impacted the hospital and the cardiovascular unit.

“Us in healthcare, we were all really just very challenged,” said Dr. Franklin. “One of the things we were able to do was provide and make sure that both patients and employees were safe. COVID-19 has been terrible, but one of the really, really good things to come out of it is really pushing forward our telemedicine and our remote monitoring. We’re now moving towards being able to examine patients remotely, like having the virtual stethoscope or the virtual EKG, virtual otoscope and other sort of things for other types of medical subspecialties as well.”

Dr. Franklin went on to explain how the community can get involved with PCH

“We want to be able to provide the best care for all of our patients in any specialty…but we also want to hear from you,” said Dr. Franklin. “Meaning, even as parents, if we’re not doing what we need to do or you guys have suggestions, we are very open. We have a very closely involved Family Advisory Council where we hear feedback from the families to help improve things. Like Tiger Woods used to say ‘if you’re not improving, you’re just standing still.’ So we really want to do that at PCH.”

To learn more about PCH, visit their website here.

To donate to PCH, click here.

To give in other ways, click here.