In medical school "we were not taught about end-of-life care," Dr. Jerry Shefren told a full-house audience at the annual "One From the Heart" awards breakfast Thursday at the Crowne Plaza hotel in south Palo Alto.

He learned that from his wife, Joyce Shefren, R.N., as she became involved in the Pathways home care and hospice program, a Palo Alto-based program founded in 1976 that now has 17 multidisciplinary teams serving the entire Peninsula, San Francisco and the East Bay.

The Shefrens were honored with the "Heart" award for their many years of support for the Pathways programs and services.

Jerry Shefren recounted one anecdote that he said illustrated the mission of Pathways to him. He said he was just getting home from a middle-of-the-night delivery of a new baby and Joyce was just getting home from assisting a family with a dying member.

She asked him how it went, and he said he replied that it was a fine and joyful experience. He said he then asked her how it went with her case, expecting to hear a sad story.

Instead, Joyce reported that it was a fine and even happy experience, with the family present and the death occurring the way the person and family desired it. He said seeing how Pathways cared for people made him a better physician.

Pathways CEO Barbara Burgess said Joyce Shefren was instrumental in creating the Pathways Kids Program and in strengthening the organization's ties to Stanford University Hospitals and Clinics, in addition to maintaining longstanding ties to El Camino Hospital and Sequoia Hospital.

Other awards included a special posthumous "John W. Gardner Visionary Award" to Congressman Tom Lantos, who died in 2008. Former Congressman Tom Campbell, who served several years with Lantos in Congress, told of his personal connection to Lantos and of Lantos' lifelong commitment to caring for the well-being of people. He said Lantos as a child experienced a German prisoner camp, then a Russian camp in Hungary, from which he escaped during the Hungarian revolution of 1956.

"The problem of evil was always on his mind," Campbell recalled.

Campbell said when he lost the race for the U.S. Senate in 1992 there was only one member of Congress who called him to ask how he was doing: Lantos. The award was accepted by Lantos' former chief of staff, Evelyn Szelenyi. Several former members of Lantos' staff fought back tears during the comments by Campbell and a short video clip of a television interview.

The Francis C. Arrillaga Humanitarian Award also went to a couple, Noble and Lorraine Hancock, presented by Cole Wilbur, a trustee and past president of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

A second Arrillaga award went to the firm of Rambus, Inc. and the Rambus Foundation. The award was presented by Nancy Dillon, whose husband, John, worked for Rambus until his illness and death in 1998 and who received support from Pathways during his illness through the 1990s.