Shannon Whittington Receives Quality and Innovation Award for Her Leadership of VNSNY’s Gender Affirmation Program

“Awesome.” That’s how Shannon Whittington, an interdisciplinary care team manager in VNSNY Home Care’s Manhattan region and the director of VNSNY’s Gender Affirmation Program, describes her experience receiving the Home Care Association (HCA) of New York’s 2018 Quality and Innovation Award on May 10th. The award was given to Shannon in recognition of her work leading VNSNY’s Gender Affirmation initiative, which provides specialized home care support to patients who have had gender affirmation surgery.

As director of the Gender Affirmation Program, noted the HCA, Shannon “is part of a team dedicated to helping a very vulnerable population at possibly the most important time in their lives to realize a safe and healthy gender transition.” The organization added, “This also has meant forging a cultural shift within nurses, managers, and senior leaders regarding transgender care.”

Shannon’s award was presented at HCA’s annual conference in Saratoga Springs, New York, where she was joined by VNSNY President and CEO Marki Flannery, Senior Vice President for Patient Care Services Susan Northover, Vice President for Government Affairs Dan Lowenstein, and other members of VNSNY’s senior leadership. In her acceptance speech, Shannon highlighted VNSNY’s Gender Affirmation Program and the patient population it serves. “The speech was very well received,” she says. “After I finished, quite a few people from other healthcare companies came up to me and said they were interested in working with us to develop similar programs at their organizations.”

The HCA Quality and Innovation Award is a reflection of how far the VNSNY program has come since its launch in 2016, notes Shannon. “This has been a journey for all of us,” she says. “When we first started, our nurses didn’t know much about gender affirmation surgery and the recovery process, and there was a good deal of uncertainty around it. Now, two years later, we have 158 clinicians trained to provide post-surgical care to these patients, and additional nurses are approaching me on a regular basis asking when they can be trained.”

To date, VNSNY’s Gender Affirmation clinicians have provided post-surgical home care to 160 patients. Patient volume is expected to take another jump upward in the coming months, as Mount Sinai Beth Israel adds new surgeons to its nationally known gender affirmation surgery program and other New York-area hospitals, including Montefiore and NYU Langone Medical Centers, expand their own activities in this area as well.

“Our clinicians are the reason why VNSNY’s gender affirmation program is so successful,” adds Shannon. “Now, when people go through gender affirmation surgery, they’re asking for the same VNSNY nurse that their friend had. Meanwhile, our nurses are enjoying taking care of this population and developing a new skill set they didn’t have before. I get calls from nurses in the program asking me, ‘When am I going to get a gender affirmation patient? I haven’t had one in a while.’ And I tell them, get ready!”