Dr. Needle Honored at 2018 ACS Gala

Dr. Jennifer Needle, MD MPH of the Department of Pediatrics, was honored for her research at the American Cancer Society (ACS) Gala.

Funded by the ACS, Dr. Needle’s work focuses on advance care planning for adolescent and youth adult transplant patients at the University of Minnesota Masonic Children’s Hospital.

Dr. Needle noticed a need for transplant patients coming into the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) who had not yet had thorough conversations about what might happen if they were to get sick.

“We can help families have some of these difficult conversations they need to have when their child is in the hospital,” explains Dr. Needle.

This research is the first to study this sort of intervention in an in-patient setting with adolescents and young adults. The hope is showing how useful these conversations are so that they can be implemented with children in hospitals all over the country. 

With the successes from the work of Dr. Needle, this research could have a lasting impact for decades to come on how hospitals are taking care of adolescent and young adult cancer patients.

This year’s ACS Gala was titled the Minnesota Made Extravaganza. It brought together professionals from Minnesota’s business and philanthropic community to celebrate everything that has given Minnesota the nickname the “Bold North”.

View the full story of Dr. Needle's work here.