Ambulatory Services Rep & SHARE Rep, University Campus Endoscopy Suite
interviewed by Anna Weick, 12/10/2020
Healthcare workers are more than just the doctor and nurse who complete your appointment. They’re also everyone behind the scenes. They’re our food service workers, our maintenance staff, our housekeeping staff -- all of these individuals play an invaluable role within the healthcare system.
I’m on the Health Equity Diversity and Inclusion Council (HEDIC) at UMass, and one of the things we’re discussing right now is ensuring that access to the COVID-19 vaccine is equitable -- that anyone on the frontlines, regardless of their title, will have access to the vaccine. It’s been really inspiring to see that intention set firsthand. The Council was looking for regular hourly employees to join the council and diversify the perspectives. Most people who serve on the council have been senior VPs and higher-level staff. I was introduced to the Council and their work through my Union Organizer. Being a part of SHARE allows me to be part of a larger conversation about creating positive changes and improving health equity in our community and even within my own workplace.
A lot of change is happening on campus, with COVID and within my department. After every briefing that Governor Baker or Dr. Dickson has to inform the public of any COVID updates, we get inundated with hundreds of phone calls, questions about the patient’s appointments and procedures. People are worried about the impact of the virus on their preventative maintenance. After one of the last conferences, patients became concerned that their outpatient procedures were being cancelled due to the announcement of the cancellation of inpatient, elective procedures. Even though my team doesn’t schedule elective inpatient procedures, our phones were off-the-hook with worried patients. The whole purpose of this announcement was to avoid inpatient bed overload, but a single word in a press briefing impacted our entire week’s work.
We have many appointments to be scheduled in the backlog due to COVID with 7 of us on staff. It’s hard because the world’s focus is on COVID-19. The focus is not on people getting their screening colonoscopies. It’s not at the forefront of people’s perception. We all start out our day with daily COVID-19 check-ins. We are still coming in every day and scheduling our patients and taking our calls. We are still doing our jobs, nothing has changed since the beginning of COVID. There was maybe a month where about three of us were doing other jobs -- I handed out masks at the front entrance -- when we weren’t scheduling as much. After that, everything went back to normal. It’s more stressful in our roles now because we are working as schedulers and healthcare providers, we provide emotional labor to patients to convince them that it’s safe and necessary for them to get their health care.
The top 5 languages in our organization are Spanish, Portuguese, English, Vietnamese, and Albanian. For the longest time we’ve been asking supervisors, managers, and others for patient instructions in those languages, and it wasn’t on their priority list. Then I finally got a chance to speak with a Nurse Supervisor of a different location and explained the problem with the lack of clear, translated instructions and the problems it posed for our patients. When I brought this concern up, we were able to address this, locate the instructions and have them uploaded. Now, every single one of the top 5 languages are in our system. I just want to make sure that our patients are taken care of and get the care they need.
Working as someone who is LGBTQ — I am queer, I am trans, I am nonbinary — and working in a medical space is definitely interesting, to say the least. There isn’t much respect around pronouns and gender identity yet, but I’m hopeful for the future we are creating. I work on the LGBTQ subcommittee for the medical school and I volunteer on the HEDIC. I’m in places where I have some influence and a voice at the table. Being queer and being in a medical setting . . . it feels like I am a trailblazer, even though I know there are so many of us in these roles. All of us are trailblazing to change how things are for the people who come after us. That is something that influences all my interactions. My drive is improving the healthcare system to care equitably for LGBTQ+ people. I’m in school now and plan on being in larger roles within the organization — I want to be running a department. I want to learn, and grow, and bring the perspective that I’ve had from working in other various roles within the organization to that table.
I love being a union rep. I like being able to help my coworkers with questions about their benefits, their work, and their rights as an employee. Everyone comes to me, as the union rep. If something goes wrong, they come to me. I’ve learned through this that a group of people standing up for a common interest not only changes the world around them but changes their individual lives. By talking to each other, sharing our experiences, and being authentic with what we deal with in our lives, we are brought closer together in the struggle. By sharing honestly with each other, we have the opportunity to create better lives for ourselves and each other. Being able to connect with people and learning about what they’ve gone through -- it brings my own struggles into perspective.
