Honoring the Healthcare Community

From first breath to last, we rely on the skill, compassion, and reassuring presence of the healthcare community. 

That is one reason that the U.S. Postal Service wanted to pay tribute to the healthcare community, whose members, sometimes at great personal risk, dedicate their lives to our health, safety, and well-being. 

We are grateful to members of this essential community, who spend their days — and nights — taking care of our health needs in hospitals, nursing homes, laboratories, and many other settings. They are our family, friends, and neighbors.

Starting with a doodle

Art director Bryan Duefrene recalls that the art for the Thank You, Healthcare Community stamp “started as a doodle” during a discussion about how to best represent the healthcare world.

This “community is vast and much more than just doctors and nurses,” he says. “You have scientists, mental health specialists, hospice caregivers, EMTs, and more. It seemed clear that the stamp should thank these individuals for the care they provide to us.” 

Duefrene felt strongly that the words “Thank You” should appear somewhere in the design. “At some point, I realized that maybe commonly used medical symbols could be manipulated to form the words ‘Thank You.’”

With that in mind, he assembled a collection of images that are not only familiar but also reassuring, even in our most vulnerable moments. 

To spell out “Thank,” he used a medical caduceus, a traffic sign indicating a nearby hospital, a microscope, the letter N rendered in the surgical green often worn by medical providers, and adhesive bandages. For the word “You,” he chose a stethoscope, a medical heart icon, and a pair of cupped hands, a graphic commonly used to indicate support and protection. 

During the planning for this stamp, the Postal Service had considered a few other design directions — including stylized portraits of individual healthcare workers and scenes of caregivers at work in their communities — but kept returning to Duefrene’s simple but eloquent original concept.

“This stamp is unusual. Oftentimes the final stamp design looks far different from the original idea. But, in this case, the initial concept was also the best,” says Lisa Bobb-Semple, Director of Stamp Services at the Postal Service. 

A vital service

USPS issued the Thank You, Healthcare Community stamp in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to help raise the profile of everyone employed in healthcare.

This is not the first time the two agencies have collaborated. In January 2022, USPS joined the national pandemic-response team, agreeing to package and deliver up to a billion HHS-supplied coronavirus test kits to American households across all states, tribes, and territories.

Employing nearly 16 million people, healthcare is one of the largest and fastest growing industries in the United States economy. It encompasses physicians and surgeons, dentists, nurses, midwives, pharmacists, lab technicians, orderlies, home health aides, hospital custodians, and emergency medical workers, among others. It also includes public health professionals such as epidemiologists, microbiologists, and data analysts.

As large as the healthcare community is, staffing shortages remain a problem. Importantly, as our country’s population continues to age, the need for healthcare workers will remain high.

Lead image by Oleksii Synelnykov/Shutterstock.