It's Official, I'm no longer JUST a Social Worker!

Most of you know that my job description has never just been a social worker. When I interviewed at my company, I was offered a job as a social worker in our new research study that would begin as soon as I started working. Unfortunately, my project was not ready to get started, so I was drafted into Hospice for a "two to four week stint" as we were losing two full-time social workers. I continued in Hospice until...well, last week! I've attempted to get out of Hospice a couple of times, transferring my patients to another social worker who was subsequently fired, leaving me with my old patients. I was finally able to transfer three of my Hospice patients last week to another new social worker. Just my luck, she'll quit in the next month and I'll get my babies back, but here's hoping that I'm not stuck again.

As I continued with Hospice patients and was working diligently to get the project started, they fired the Palliative Care social worker and I assumed most all of her patients. As of today, I still have 10 Palliative Care patients. They continue to promise me that they're working on hiring a full-time Palliative Care social worker that will be able to take all of my patients, but that hasn't happened yet.

In addition to Hospice and Palliative Care, the project manager for the research study left on maternity leave on February 28th. As of March 1st, I assumed all of the project management duties, which included creating the psychosocial assessment, creating all of the forms for the welcome packet, attending management meetings, acting as a liaison between us and ALL of the funders and writing interim reports for the funders to maintain the grant. Unfortunately, assuming all of these duties did not come with a new title or more money.

So, let's recap: I'm managing the new project, which has now included contacting new referrals by telephone and knocking on their doors, doing initial psychosocial assessments and maintaining a new caseload of five high-risk, time consuming patients. Also, I'm attending the Palliative Care team meetings weekly, taking on new Palliative Care patients, seeing my current 10 patients, helping the billing department with gathering the necessary information from patients to bill them, managing the Palliative Care database, and being the go-to gal for all Palliative Care questions due to the fact that I'm the only team member that has been around since the beginning of the Palliative Care program. Did I also mention that I have 1 high-risk, time consuming Hospice patient who will leave behind three small children when she dies?

In case that wasn't enough for me to do, I was assigned an intern two weeks ago. This intern (who is awesome!) will be with me three days a week from now until May! As much as I relish the idea of having an intern to share my case load with and to have an extra hand to help me with menial tasks, unfortunately, I have to train her and teach her about social work. She's originally from Japan and has been in NYC for four weeks. She's a first-year student and doesn't have any sort of background in social work. So a great deal of my time in the last two weeks has been spent training her, orienting her and creating a social work resource binder for each of the 6 interns and 9 social workers. How I got stuck with that task, I have no idea, but I completed it and it was beautiful!

The new project is really taking off and I've mentioned before that I've been having some difficulty with the nurse that I am working with. Because I'm only "acting" project manager, she refuses to listen to me when I tell her to do something. So, the true reason for this post was to tell everyone that I finally went to the VP of Hospice & Palliative Care as well as the VP of Research and the Director of Psychosocial Services to request that they either appoint someone as project manager or give me the position, along with the raise.

Well, they agreed that it was very important to have a project manager and that the choice that would be best for the program and everyone involved would be to give me the job title. As of two weeks ago I was officially given the job of Health Plus at Home Project Manager. I should find out this week how much my raise is, and the best part of the raise is that it's retro-active to March 1st!!!!!

I'm so relieved to have the title, even though it doesn't change anything that I've been doing. So, after 10 months of being at my job, I have risen to the ranks of middle management. I couldn't be happier with the promotion and I am so excited that I have proved myself to the "higher ups"! So I'll continue to keep my fingers crossed that someday soon I'll be out of Palliative Care for good and full-time into my new project!

Wow, I never planned for this to be such a long post, but I tend to be long-winded sometime. Sorry readers! I'll take this opportunity to sign off and start working on my plans for my intern this week...