Thirty years ago, Shawn Drumgoole took a life-saving ride to Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt to be placed on Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO).

VUMC has signed an agreement with Ballad Health, a regional health system serving East Tennessee and Southwest Virginia, to train its team to provide a life-saving medical program called ECMO.

Whitney Gannon MSN, MS, RN, APRN, has been named to the new position of director of Quality and Education for the Vanderbilt Extracorporeal Life Support Program (ECLS).

Vanderbilt LifeFlight is part of an elite group of air ambulance services across the country that offer emergency transport of critically ill patients who are on Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO), and it is the first helicopter program in Tennessee to offer this highly skilled, specialized transport.

Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) is home to the state’s largest adult Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO) Program. And most recently, it became the only adult program in Tennessee with a mobile team that can initiate ECMO on patients transported to the Medical Center by its ambulances.

For the third straight time, Vanderbilt’s heart and lung life-support program has received the ELSO Award for Excellence in Life Support by the Extracorporeal Life Support Organization (ELSO).