PORT ANGELES — Tickets remain available for today’s Olympic Medical Center Foundation’s seventh annual Red, Set, Go! Heart Luncheon, where the special honoree will be Jen Gouge, recently of Peninsula College.
The Jamestown S’Klallam tribe will present the luncheon at 11:30 a.m. at the Vern Burton Community Center, 308 E. Fourth St.
Tickets available
Individual tickets are $50. Phone the foundation office at 360-417-7144.
All of the money raised at the luncheon will go to local cardiac service care, said Karen Rogers, foundation board president.
Gouge, who recently retired after 17 years as the medical assistant coordinator for Peninsula College, is considered a national expert on geriatrics, said Bruce Skinner, foundation director.
College course starter
She not only trained many of the professionals now treating patients in the area but also was essential to the start of many courses at the college, including two programs, infectious diseases and geriatrics.
“Because we have large population of people over 65 in Clallam County, I thought this was a real necessity, to have geriatric course work at the college,” Gouge has said.
“Even more importantly, I thought we had to educate students about abuse of the elderly, which is so rampant.”
Gouge was twice invited to present papers on the social consequences of aging at Oxford University in England, the foundation said.
Keynote speaker
The keynote speaker will be Dr. Samuel Youssef, a Swedish Hospital cardiac surgeon with a specialization in robotic cardiac surgery.
Youssef found mentors in minimally invasive and robotic cardiac surgery among leaders in the field in Belgium and studied heart failure and cardiac transplantation at Imperial College in London.
He studied philosophy and developmental biology at the University of California, Los Angeles, before studying medicine in Cambridge, England.
He served as a trauma surgery and obstetrics house officer in Uganda.
Youssef trained in general surgery at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle and then pursued cardiothoracic surgery training at Yale University.
He has authored several books, book chapters and scientific articles.
Red, Set, Go! has its roots in a 2008 campaign that the OMC Foundation launched to raise awareness about women’s heart health.
Past benefits
In the first five years, the event has raised money to benefit patients through the Olympic Medical Center’s Cardiac Services Department and to fund a communitywide automated external defibrillator program in partnership with area law enforcement agencies.
