Sunday night, Jeremy and I were having a conversation about receiving recognition at work. In my line of work, it is pretty much a given that the recognition and satisfaction that I receive comes from having been able to provide the sort of help that our patients really need. When I get a call, the patient is almost always stressed. They are in pain, they are worried about their health, it is a family member that is concerned about the patient, or the patient may even be angry. Having been a patient before, I can surely understand the frustration of being passed from one person to the next and not having someone just simply stop to help you. I can often identify the moment when I know I’ve been successful, as I hear the sigh of relief, or in some cases, of resignment. That is the moment that I take my own internal sigh of relief, mission accomplished, again.
As Irony would have it, Monday I got called into my boss’s office. In that short walk from my desk to her office, I think every possible scenario ran through my head. The news was good though, St Luke’s has a program that is meant to promote our value’s system (Trust and Respect, Integrity, Partnership and Services, Safety, Efficency, Teamwork, Compassion) and when a person does something to set an example of one of these, they are rewarded with a medal, a note in their record and acknowledgement on the bulletin board in the break room. Heather was pleased to tell me that I’d earned not one, but two, all in the same day. She said that not only was it unheard of to earn not one, but two, this soon, but one of them was for Integrity, which is difficult to earn. She had the medal for Compassion, but not the one for Integrity, so I took my congratulations and my Compassion medal and went back to my desk.
As you can imagine, the relationship between the nurses and the “admin staff” can sometimes become strained. For them to acknowledge what was, to me, my job, means a whole lot! The nurses get a reputation, sometimes earned, sometimes not, for being harsh, for snapping at us and for just being plain ol’ grumpy.
So today, someone dropped an interoffice envelope on my desk, addressed to me, from a nurse at one of the other clinics that we take calls for. I joked that maybe I should be careful with it, it could very well be a letter bomb, since it was coming from Jenny, not someone known for being exceptionally nice to call center staff.
Imagine my surprise to open it and find yet another slip thanking me for the job I did on a specific call and asking Heather to award me Compassion, Teamwork and Efficiency. You can only earn a medal for one item and I already had compassion, Teamwork is easy to earn, so I was awarded my 3rd medal, for Efficiency.
3 in one week! To say that I was floored is an understatement. Perhaps the only thing more important than the opportunity to wear these medals on my lanyard every day, is the fact that each of these goes into my employee file. These will really help me along my path as I figure out what it is that I want to do with my career.
I still haven’t recieved the Integrity medal, it is difficult enough to earn that they don’t even keep a supply of them in the office. The one on the left is the Compassion medal and the one on the right reads “Efficiency and Financial Responsibility”.
Receiving this third medal today helped me make up my mind about something, I officially sent off for information on getting my Certified Medical Assistant (CMA) Certificate, to several schools. I’m going to try for something that is mainly online based, since my time is limited. St Luke’s has an excellent tuition reimbursement program, which means that they’ll ultimately be paying for me to get certified.
Thanks for sharing this with me!
