Alumna Spotlight: JoAnn Tran
When the COVID-19 outbreak hit the nation, many professionals in the medical field were faced with a challenging shift in their day-to-day duties. JoAnn Tran, graduate of both the Human Development and Health Care Administration programs at CSULB, was no exception to this phenomenon. As a Site Supervisor for Optometry and Vision Essentials by Kaiser Permanente she shared her experiences dealing with the aftermath of the novel coronavirus as it continues to affect the field of medicine.
I work in the Woodland Hills Medical Center and my primary role is to oversee revenue for eyewear and stay within access for patients seeking eye appointments (among many other things!)
Yes dramatically! With stay at home orders, my job has since shifted to assisting as one of the PMs for our Physician Redeployment Team (in the event that we should surge, specialty physicians would back fill for physicians that are covering in urgent care, ED and hospitalists. I have also been assisting with the labor redeployment pool as most non critical and specialty departments, including mine, are only seeing members urgent visits so the ample staff are redeployed into a pool and reassigned work to other positions such as temperature screeners, pharmacy runners and supply chain distribution.
I have taken on the role of cheerleader; I am constantly keeping the morale of my staff up. Most of my employees have been used to working banker type hours and with COVID-19, a very large portion of them are now working nights and weekends. Some shifts start as early as 3:30am and some as late as 11pm. They are working in parts of the building that they never knew existed and are performing tasks that are not outside of their scope, but definitely outside of their comfort zone. Sometimes literally! Our LVN has now worked in the screening tent in the freezing cold rain and in above 90 degree weather.
The biggest challenge for me thus far is navigating the unknown. My job description is almost moot as the only “normal” thing that I have been doing is payroll, but things have been changing by the week, day and sometimes even the minute but I love it! It’s fun trying to figure out solutions to problems such as how to continue to see patients but not break any social distancing rules within the physical confinement of the department and pushing boundaries such as coming up with new provider templates and workflows so that we can still see face to face patients while adding in more tele-health visits and ultimately function effectively as an entire department.
