Adrian Ong came back from a month-long vacation to be told by me, the acting Nurse Manager, that he was being reassigned to a different patient workload as one of the RNs had left the department. Mr. Ong immediately dug right in and started to work on the other staff’s workload. The office of Community Care works with what is called an alpha split. The assignments are based upon whether they are male or female, and if male, are assigned based on the first letter of their last name and the care complexity.

After receiving the change in assignments, Mr. Ong did not take his breaks or his lunch. He only left his desk when he had to. He worked diligently to get caught up with a long list of Veterans who needed to be contacted to schedule care so they did not fall through the cracks and have an untoward event. He stayed and worked late each evening until 7 pm and asked to come in at 5 am one morning so he could attempt to get caught up. Community Care is a very fast-moving department in which there are a lot of processes involved to coordinate care for Veterans. He had to perform an administrative review followed by a Clinical review on each Veteran who had a newly ordered Community Care consult. He then reached out to the Veteran to get their scheduling preferences as well as community provider preferences if within the Optum network. Some Veterans choose to schedule themselves, while others depend on the staff to do this. Once scheduled, paperwork must be faxed to outside providers as well as notifying the Veterans of their appointments. He did this without complaint. He has also been in the department for less than a year.