Can This Be Done By 1pm Today?
Discussion 2: Personal Challenges
This course has focused on the goal of changing the world through one person, one organization, and one community at a time. Through course readings, media, and learning activities, you have gained insights to this exciting field and challenging task of igniting change. For this Discussion, reflect on what you believe will be most challenging for you, as a human services professional aspiring to influence change. Consider strategies you might use to overcome these challenges and positively impact clients.
With these thoughts in mind:
Post a brief description of what you believe will be most challenging for you, as a human services professional, based on the topics covered in this week’s media presentation. Explain two strategies you might use to address these potential challenges. Include specific examples of how you might implement these strategies.West Michigan Cancer Center
West Michigan Cancer Center Program Transcript
[MUSIC PLAYING]
TERRY MCKAY: I would define a human services professional as someone who has a great deal of passion for human needs; whether they are shelter, food, health care, or whatever the need of the human spirit requires. In my particular profession, we deal with patients and we treat patients with cancer. So, they have a great deal of needs for treatment, but they also have needs that affect their family life, their everyday life, their work life. One of the major drivers of anyone who works with cancer patients, in particular, is compassion.
There was a national search for a CEO to head up this comprehensive cancer center called the West Michigan Cancer Center, which is a joint venture of two competing hospitals here in Kalamazoo.
In 1992, the two hospitals Borgess and Bronson hospitals were both in need of very expensive radiation therapy equipment. Back then; each piece of this equipment would be costing over 1 million dollars. At that time, the CEO of Upjohn, the very large pharmaceutical company here in Kalamazoo that is now Pfizer and some other city fathers got together and suggested that perhaps a joint venture might be in order so that we would not have duplication of very costly equipment here in Kalamazoo. So, they came together and they were intent on building a joint venture and having a radiation therapy center alone.
There was someone who went to national meetings and said who is one of the top five individuals in the business of oncology who knows how to build a cancer center and manage it and my name came up.
I got a phone call from Kalamazoo, Michigan, in Philadelphia at my desk. And they said, “Will you come for an interview.” I have to admit the farthest and the only place I had ever been in the Midwest was Chicago. I had no idea about Kalamazoo, Michigan. I had not even heard the song about I had a gal in Kalamazoo.
I have my undergraduate degree and graduate degree in business administration and my graduate degree is from the University of Pennsylvania. So, presumably, I could run any kind of a business. But there is no other business than that of taking care of cancer patients that I would want to embark upon.
(TERRY WITH ASSISTANT)
© 2014 Laureate Education, Inc. 1
West Michigan Cancer Center
How I got into the profession is I rather fell into because I had a very close friend who was in a position to recommend me for what turned out to be the job of my lifetime working for an internationally renowned cancer expert in Philadelphia at Hahnemann University who I worked with for 21 years and was a mentor of mine and taught me everything that I know about the specialty of oncology and also everything I know about how to run a business. So, I was pretty blessed into coming into that position and it was my passion and my compassion that kept me in this field of oncology.
The evolution of caring for a cancer patient has taken a very long road from back in 1992 when this was, this concept was first developed and of having a comprehensive cancer center with all services under one roof. When we first started, we had the basics. We had medical oncology, chemotherapy, radiation therapy. But, you know then there was some studies that came out very early on in the 90s about exercise improving and staving off recurrence of breast cancer. And, that kind of was the kernel of what more can we do for our patients, what more can we do to get their life back.
I was really intent upon having a cancer center not look like a hospital setting, but rather one of a welcoming large living room where people would come in and feel pretty welcome and pretty comfortable. So, the architecture and the services that we started with back in 1994 when we opened our doors was very intense upon treating the entire person, not just the disease. During that treatment, we want to treat them holistically. And so we started off with some exercise programs and from there we went on to the massage. And so we really do push treating this total person, treating the person psychologically, with nutrition—we have on staff a dietitian that the patients see for consultation, for help with good diet and exercise programs, we have cooking classes here once a month, again to teach patients how to cook healthy dinners.
It’s not us giving them chemo, it’s not them—us giving them radiation. They are doing the exercise, they’re doing the cooking, they’re seeking out the psychological counseling, they’re going to Pilates. They’re taking control of their own destiny. It empowers them.
We have a hundred volunteers here who have all been survivors of our cancer center who are the coffee cart ladies who go around and give coffee twice a day. We have clown therapy. We have art therapy. We have music therapy. These are all volunteers who have gone through their treatment here, gone through that scary time when they first entered our doors and they come back because they want to pay back, they want to give back to the patients.
When you have the diagnosis of cancer, it’s a huge interruption of your life and you come here every day for radiation therapy, or you come here for 6 months for chemotherapy, you have a really strong lifeline to this, to the Cancer Center, to this organization.
© 2014 Laureate Education, Inc. 2
West Michigan Cancer Center
My focus and responsibilities as CEO is to be sure that I have highly skilled, qualified staff taking care of patients, that I have the necessary funding and finances to support the mission of taking care of all patients, regardless of their ability to pay.
We are a not for profit organization and we have an obligation to serve all people of southwest Michigan in particular. And many of those patients will come to our doors without the wherewithal to pay for our services but are in dire need of our services.
We understand this is not something they planned to do. This is not something they elected. We really are pretty reasonable and working with them and to pay off their balance and on a time line that’s comfortable for them and an amount of money that’s comfortable for them.
Because we’re not for profit, we take care of people who are—who have an inability to pay. So, we rely on fund-raising, we rely on relationships where we can get drug replenishment for people who are not able to pay for the chemotherapy drugs that are very, very expensive. So, we have a lot of other human service organizations with which we work because we need to do that in order to treat every single person equally. The primary demographic that we see here at the Cancer Center are senior citizens, so they’re on Medicare.
The second largest demographic that we service are what I’m going to call our pre baby boomers and they are or the baby boomers who are not yet 65. This generation is the most educated, certainly of the generations that have gone before, certainly the most demanding, and also have the highest expectations. And so when you are running an organization like the West Michigan Cancer Center and this group of individuals are diagnosed by cancer, they have already gone out on the Internet, they have researched everything that there is about their disease, they have researched every possible treatment regiment that they can go on and they come here armed with all of these print-outs from the Internet and have almost a pre-disposition of what treatment regiment they’re going to go on. So it’s really requiring a new set of skills by our physicians to really deal with this very well educated, well-informed, well-resourced population. It isn’t just, “Take this and call me in the morning,” anymore. Our physicians really go into a great deal of explanation of why this, why this and what the side effects are. And it goes back very much, frankly, to our philosophy of treating the entire person
I was not aware that there was a Lifeline Initiative available through the Kalamazoo Community Foundation and the Greater United Way. But I had a need and my need was that when I was president for the Susan G. Komen southwest Michigan affiliate, I began a program called pink Saturdays.
© 2014 Laureate Education, Inc. 3
West Michigan Cancer Center
Pink Saturdays is a program that offers free mammograms every Saturdays in October, which is breast cancer awareness month, to women who are uninsured. The women call an 800 number and they are asked a series of questions because these are screening mammograms. They answer a series of questions about their general breast health if you will, and also about their financial situation.
So they have the mammogram and the mammogram can either be fine and they’re told, they get a letter that says the mammogram is fine, no further studies or anything needs to be done or they may get notified that it’s—they want to have other compression films or they want to have an ultrasound or they want to have a biopsy.
We have carefully set up this program that the women not only get the screening mammogram but if they have any other…
