Day One

I started my volunteer assignment at the hospital yesterday.  I had a great time and met a lot of really nice people.  I have two assignments--Patient Registration and Marketing.  I spent yesterday in Patient Registration and learned how the hospital prepares for the numerous patients they see everyday.     

 

I was the "greeter" for incoming patients, I had them register (name, date of birth, doctor's name, appointment time and reason for the appointment) and then they were matched  with their doctor's orders (from the computer).  From there, I either took them to the Lab, X-Ray or Surgery. 

 

In between doing the greeting, I built charts for the patients coming in for the next week.  There were codes that had to be on the chart regarding the illness and the wrist bands had to match the name and date of birth of the patient.   The few times I have been a patient in a  hospital, I always thought it was kind of silly having to give the nurses my name and date of birth every time we interacted, but I realized that mistakes can be made if you have a common name.  Next week there are four women with the same very common name coming in for different things.  They are only different on paper because of their dates of birth.

 

The staff members that I met encouraged me to check the hospital website for jobs.   They said it is very common to have volunteers fill job openings, so that is my mission today. 

 

I worked the noon to 4:00 p.m. shift and after I got home we went to the Club for the "Connection" event where you meet different people.  So yesterday was a very active day for me.

 

Needless to say that after being on my feet all day my legs are killing me today, but I had a great time...in a small way it was having a job again and I really enjoyed that.