Sentara wins six Healthcare Heroes awards for 2025

Sentara Health won six Healthcare Heroes awards for exceptional programs and people in the annual competition sponsored by Virginia Media, publishers of The Virginian-Pilot, Daily Press, The Virginia Gazette, and Inside Business. The awards included two joint programs by Sentara and Eastern Virginia Media School (EVMS) addressing chronic health issues equitably across the communities we serve.

The Sentara/EVMS Cardio-Obstetrics Center won for addressing cardiac events that appear during and after pregnancy. Heart disease is the primary killer of new mothers, but there have been no deaths among dozens of women who gave birth while being managed by the program. It was founded in 2024 by Sentara cardiologist Petra Lynch, M.D., and Gloria Too, M.D., the clinical chief of EVMS Maternal Fetal Medicine.

Dr. Petra Lynch

The Sentara EVMS Comprehensive Sickle Cell clinic, funded by Sentara and led by EVMS’ Madeeha Deo, M.D., offers compassionate care, pain control, and long-term management of sickle cell disease, which disproportionately affects historically underserved populations, primarily Black and Hispanic Americans. The clinic is designed to mitigate the cycle of emergency room visits for sickle cell crises and make the disease a more manageable chronic condition.

Dr. Madeeha Deo

Sentara cardiologist John Herre, M.D., won for more than 30 years of service to Sentara’s Advanced Heart Failure program. Dr. Herre’s team manages hundreds of patients with medicines and rehabilitation, ventricular assist devices, artificial hearts and, in some cases, heart transplants. Dr. Herre once drove 65 miles in a roaring thunderstorm over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel to pick up an Eastern Shore patient with a donor heart waiting. That passion for patients, and a history of clinical success, earned him this much-deserved recognition.

Dr. John Herre

Michael Hooper, M.D., VP and Chief Academic Officer, won for Healthcare Leadership. Dr. Hooper is a pulmonologist and former Chief Medical Officer for Sentara Norfolk General Hospital, the primary teaching hospital for EVMS. He has been pivotal in maintaining Sentara’s long-standing clinical and academic collaborations with EVMS as it became affiliated with Old Dominion University.

Dr. Michael Hooper

The Healthcare Staff award went to Anthony White, a mechanic in the Facilities Department at Sentara Virginia Beach General Hospital who is also an artist. For more than 20 years, Mr. White has designed and painted holiday-themed murals at the hospital to brighten the days of patients, visitors, and staff. Mr. White is retiring, and his final reveal was greeted by cheers and applause from more than 40 staff and leaders, who showed him their appreciation for his efforts to brighten the workplace for so many seasons.

Anthony White

The Volunteer award went to retired Virginia Beach Deputy Sheriff Doug Richendollar, who has amassed almost 11,000 volunteer hours in the emergency department at Sentara Leigh Hospital in Norfolk, Virginia. Doug’s commitment had its beginnings in the death of his daughter, Kelly, a trauma nurse with Sentara, who died in 2007 in a tour bus accident in Belize. Doug and his wife Sylvia, a VP of operations with Sentara, coped with their grief partly through work and volunteering. Doug has never stopped serving, whether in a sheriff’s department uniform, or the golf shirt of a Sentara volunteer.

Doug Richendollar

An awards breakfast for winners, their families, and colleagues is scheduled for March 27, 2025, at the Westin Town Center in Virginia Beach, Virginia. A special section of Inside Business will feature this year’s Healthcare Heroes and their stories.

These awards represent a small fraction of the extraordinary work going on in every division of Sentara to serve our mission to improve health every day. In our hospitals, medical practices, community care centers, and patients’ homes, aboard mobile clinics and mammography vans, or through direct philanthropy, Sentara partners with our communities in their journeys toward health and wellness.

We are grateful to Virginia Media for conducting the annual Healthcare Heroes program and allowing us to showcase the Sentara people and programs making a difference in the communities we serve.