Desiree Batiste, Houston, TX

Harris County Hospital District
In November 2007, after several months of being physically exhausted, working 10-hour days, and preparing to move to another home, Desiree Batiste recalls lying down to take a nap. She didn’t wake up until five days later when her family found her barely alive on the floor in her house and called 9-1-1. When she awoke in the district’s Quentin Mease Community Hospital, she only had one leg. Doctors still don’t know what caused Batiste to fall unconscious but they credit her healthy lifestyle as being the thing that saved her life.
Desiree now volunteers her time at HCHD. She explained this by saying, “Because of the excellent care I have received at HCHD, I have an obligation to show these people my appreciation and I can’t think of a better way of doing it than giving my time to make the staff’s workday easier.”
The Harris County Hospital District is the public health care system for the nation’s third most-populous county. It provides more than a million health care visits each year to residents of Harris County. The hospital district operates Ben Taub General Hospital, Lyndon B. Johnson General Hospital, Quentin Mease Community Hospital, 12 community health centers, a dental center, eight school-based clinics, 13 homeless shelter clinics and five mobile health units.