 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
 |
Tuesday, May 13
|
 |
 |
||||
 |
|
||||||
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||
 Barbara Barron |
Diversity at Work: One Woman's Story
Originally published in Chicago Hospital News, Jan. 2006
by Sharon Latson
Five years ago Barbara Barron was looking for a full-time position and answered an ad for administrative help at VITAS Innovative Hospice Care® of Chicagoland South. She had a good interview with Business Manager Jeff Martin, but he told her she was over-qualified for the position and promised to call when a more appropriate position opened up. She left thinking she wouldn’t hear from VITAS again.
But two weeks later Martin did call, and Barron was hired as a patient care secretary. With office healthcare experience, she felt comfortable accepting the job, but she had no idea what hospice entailed. “OK,” she remembers thinking, “end-of-life care. This will be different.”
This month hospitals and healthcare providers from all over Chicago gather on Martin Luther King Day for a Diversity Job Fair, vying for candidates very much like the Barbara Barron of five years ago: little to no healthcare experience, lots of potential and a desire to succeed. This is Barron’s story.
On the day of new-employee orientation, Barron awoke to a blizzard. Determined to prove she was reliable, Barron managed to get from her home in Harvey to the VITAS office in Matteson, even arriving early. Her manager was pleasantly surprised; she was the only new employee who had made it through the snow for orientation. Barron continued to impress, doing her job by day and then staying late to catch up on paperwork left undone by her predecessor.
In the process she learned the business of patient care. One day about a month into the job it dawned on her that hospice wasn’t so foreign after all. Every summer as a child she had gone to visit her grandmother in Jackson, Mississippi, where her family had helped care for the terminally ill in a portion of her grandmother’s home. “We didn’t use words like hospice and end-of-life care back then,” says Barron. “Grandma just took care of dying people. But she was a nurse, and she had a grant to turn her home into what today we would call a hospice.”
Barron’s grandmother notwithstanding, by 2003 VITAS had recognized that African Americans and other racial and ethnic groups were not accessing hospice care at rates comparable to the overall population. So the company decided to launch a focused, coordinated education and outreach campaign to bring the hospice message to the African-American community and others. They needed educators, called community reps; Philip Coleman, VITAS Coordinator of Community Access & Education, was the first. He came to Chicagoland South to talk about the need and the job requirements: people who were comfortable talking to people of all walks of life and who could work with the religious community of the south suburbs.
Barron had not come to VITAS with visions of climbing the corporate ladder. “But it sounded like a role that would fit me,” she says. “I’ve been an ordained minister for 15 years.” Still, she knew that corporations didn’t typically encourage secretaries to branch out into field work. “Most places wouldn’t give you a chance,” she says bluntly.
But VITAS gave her a chance. She interviewed with three managers involved in the hiring decision. They recognized her strengths—“I had no idea I had such a jewel here,” one told her—and gave her the well-deserved promotion.
Barron was excited, but she knew the south suburbs weren’t downtown, and her approach could not echo Coleman’s. “I knew it would be footwork and one-on-one relationships. I knew I would make it work, but it would be breaking new ground.”
And for the past 2 ½ years, that’s just what VITAS Community Rep Barbara Barron has done. She has gone into the churches to explain what hospice is and how it changes the lives of patients and their loved ones. She’s listened to funeral directors and learned how VITAS can help them serve the community. She’s taught hospice under the auspices of the American Lung Association. She can be found in the library and in the senior community center. She collaborates with home health agencies. She speaks at career days.
She is in on the ground floor with students learning to be certified nursing assistants. “I do an overview of the opportunities they have in hospice, and their eyes light up,” says Barron. “They are like me when I first learned about hospice. I tell them death and dying are a miniscule part of VITAS. It’s more about life choices.”
VITAS has been about life choices for Barron, too. “I love my job,” she says. “It’s been a journey, and not always an easy journey. But I made it happen—with lots of support from the staff, and particularly from Director of Market Development Katrina Agnew. Best of all is seeing the fruit of your labor, and knowing the community and the company are seeing it too.”
100 South Biscayne Blvd, Suite 1500 Miami, FL
33131 (305) 374-4143 |
