Five Questions (Plus One)
Good morning!
In this interval between the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, I hope you have been able to have some time with family and recharge your batteries. I am personally excited about the new year ahead of us and I am looking forward to 2020 as a year of progress and fulfillment for UMMC and those we serve.
Since it’s the last Friday of the month, I’ll answer some of your questions today. As a reminder, I read all of your questions and appreciate your feedback. Although I’m not able to answer them all in this forum, I share the rest of them with senior administrators for review and possible action. Now, let’s go to your questions.
Q: The faculty at Ole Miss were given Dec. 23 to Jan. 1 off as holidays. These faculty receive the same amount of personal leave as those of us at UMMC. After working long non-stop hours over the course of the fall semester, most non-clinical faculty could use a break to recharge before spring semester begins. Although our leave policies are generous, it seems odd that the non-clinical faculty at UMMC are not afforded the same benefits as our colleagues in Oxford. Most of us have to use an entire week of vacation time to receive the same break. Is there any way to resolve this inconsistency for the non-clinical faculty? It could be one form of a benefit since we do not get frequent raises or market adjustments like the clinical employees.
A: That’s a fair question and I certainly understand where you’re coming from. The fact is we are one of nine IHL institutions, but being the only academic medical center distinguishes us in important ways, including from Ole Miss, our parent institution. The biggest difference in this regard is our faculty members are contracted to work based on 12-month workloads and salaries, while most of the IHL institutions - including Ole Miss - contract with their faculty based on nine- or 10-month workloads and salaries. Also, Ole Miss' campus operations shut down for the holiday, which is not feasible for us. In addition to our health care operations, which are 24/7/365, our Campus Police, Facilities Services and other support services must be operational at all times. In this environment, it would be extremely challenging to determine a fair and manageable way to offer some employees - and not others - extended holiday benefits. Though we have different mission areas, we are one institution and the success and efficacy of each mission depends on the others.
Q: What are they building on the roof of the operating rooms? I'm dying of curiosity.
A: The structure you refer to, which can be readily seen from the visitor hallways of the Critical Care Hospital, is being built to house new air handling units for the main operating rooms, which are immediately below. My understanding is that the existing HVAC units serving the ORs need to be replaced, but doing so in the conventional way would be too disruptive to the OR schedule. So we are building this new structure to house the replacement units. In addition to installing these large heating and cooling units, we are upgrading to digital controls in the 16 ORs and adjacent corridors, which will provide much more responsive environmental control. The scheduled completion date for the project is next September.
Q: I think a town hall with education program administrators and student clerkship administrators would be a wonderful event. Academics seems to have fallen off the radar here at UMMC.
A: Town hall-style meetings, like the one I hosted earlier this month, can be wonderful opportunities to have a free-flowing dialogue with our campus community on wide-ranging topics. We had town halls in the past dedicated to particular mission areas (education, research, patient care) and I’m sure we will again in the future. It’s a challenge to host these events at a time when a large number of employees can break away from their daily activities to attend, but I believe it’s important to make the effort. Based on feedback from my recent town hall, I will be scheduling two town halls per year at times that complement our fall and spring faculty meetings. We’ll also look at scheduling more focused town halls for each mission area, in consultation with the respective associate vice chancellors.
Q: If an employee has an appointment in the Pavilion, should he/she have permission to park in patient parking until after the appointment? It seems that employees aren't allowed to park in patient parking even as a patient, which will result in a citation and vehicle immobilization (boot).
A: I checked with our campus parking staff and, yes, UMMC employees can park their vehicles at the University Physicians Pavilion if they are being seen as patients. We have instructed our parking gate attendant to provide employees with placards they can put in their windshields so they won’t get ticketed. If a placard is not offered by the gate attendant, the employee should ask for one. In the event that an employee does get a ticket or boot in this area, if he or she is able to provide proof of a medical visit to our parking enforcement team or to our parking office staff by showing documentation of the patient appointment or after-visit summary, the ticket will be voided. Finally, if the employee does not have this information readily available at the time and he or she pays the citation, we offer him, or her the opportunity to appeal the ticket, and the appeal will be reviewed by an appeals committee.
Q: We all recently completed our hand hygiene annual education course on Healthstream. My question relates to water temperature for proper hygiene. Have you ever tried to get warm water out of a tap controlled by motion sensors? The brief trickle these faucets produce does not heat up to temperature, making it difficult to perform proper hand hygiene. Cold weather days like those that we have had recently will make you pine for the summer when you wash hands in public areas. Thanks to all who diligently wash their hands!
A: I’m glad you have become such a fierce hand hygiene warrior! I hope your attitude is contagious. And yes, it can be difficult to practice appropriate hand hygiene due to limitations like ready access to foam dispensers or the water flow controls you mention. I think the answer is to try your best at all times to clean your hands the best you can. That is far better than doing nothing.
Q: Many of us appreciate the wellness initiative and efforts that are made to assist us with a healthy work environment, encouraging us to eat healthier, walk more, etc. One thing that could be addressed, though, is the excessive number of emails, newsletters, bulletins, etc. that we are inundated with on a weekly basis. It seems every department/school/area has a newsletter or a bulletin or something coming out biweekly, weekly, monthly – just too often. We all balance the need for information with the problem of not grasping the information at all because we are too stressed or overwhelmed to read most of it. It's lost in translation and let's just face it – it’s just too much. Everyone/every department that sends out a weekly, biweekly, or monthly newsletter needs to think about whether or not that information could be consolidated into a quarterly or semiannual communication and the amount of emails also probably need to decrease significantly for us individually. Can it wait until we see each other next? Would an old fashioned phone call be better? The only person who really needs a weekly campus-wide email is you, with the VC Notes. Everyone else can most likely space it out, consolidate. Give us an email breather. It would be healthier, less stressful and may result in more folks actually reading what comes out.
A: As I touched on in a recent VC Notes Q&A about campus communication and the UMMC Intranet, it can be difficult to find a balance between over-communicating and under-communicating. For every person like you who feels inundated with administrative communications, there are others who want more communication. At the institutional level, we try to limit reliance on our campus-wide emails, preferring instead to rely on aggregated communication vehicles like the intranet and the eCV newsletter. But there is no question that the desire of schools, departments and other subdivisions of the Medical Center to communicate to their constituencies is on the rise. I think it’s up to each individual to decide what information he or she wishes to consume and what information he or she may safely ignore. If audience interest is weak for a particular communication vehicle, hopefully the originators will get the message.
Once again, I wish you and yours a happy and healthy 2020. Every year that passes gives us another opportunity to get closer to our ultimate goal of A Healthier Mississippi.