Bud Brame has been with LifeNet Health for 38 of the organization’s 40 years — longer than any other employee. He was the fifth person to join the team when he came on board to set up a new microbiology lab in 1984.
“In the early days, it was just a handful of us, and we did everything,” Bud said. “Those were really good times. It’s been a great journey.”
Today, LifeNet Health has expanded into a global organization with more than 1,200 employees. Bud has held many jobs over the years, including his current role as a General Manager and Vice President. He’s seen a lot of changes, but he’s especially proud of his work to help expand services, including LifeNet Health’s growth as a provider of skin grafts, and more recently, biospecimens to support medical and scientific research. “I was in the right place at the right time, and I have been able to help set up a lot of programs that exist now,” he said.
Bud also values LifeNet Health’s commitment to building strong processes, which have led to the organization being recognized as a center of excellence for the allografts that are transplanted into hundreds of thousands of patients around the world each year.
He experienced that impact directly when his wife developed breast cancer. “She had to have a reconstruction, and she had one of our skin products,” he said. “I wouldn’t allow them to put any other graft in her.”
More recently, he’s seen the organization successfully navigate a once-in-a-lifetime challenge, the COVID-19 pandemic, through strategic, long-term decisions. This included expanding staff and increasing the potential to provide more allografts, when many organizations were making the opposite moves.
As LifeNet Health celebrates four decades of saving lives, restoring health, and giving hope, Bud remains excited for the future. His current goal is to establish LifeNet Health as a premier provider of healthy and diseased biospecimens to support scientific and medical research worldwide.
While the organization has grown tremendously, its core values remain the same, and Bud is still inspired by them every day. “What we do, it helps so many people, it’s such a good thing,” he said. “This is a really great place to be.”
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