RIVERBEND: BEHIND THE SCENES

THANK YOU TO OUR SUPPORT STAFF

When you hear “essential workers”, what do you picture? For most of us, we’ll picture doctors and nurses dressed in full personal protective equipment. We’ll envision mail carriers, waste collectors, or cashiers at the grocery. We may even picture the many mental health staff who work daily to ensure that our clients’ mental health needs are still being met.

It can be easy to forget that essential organizations are comprised of so much more than the front-line staff. In addition to illustrating the important ways our clinical teams work together to serve our community, we also want to highlight some of the teams that work behind the scenes to support our front-line staff.

Brandon Nelson, Director of Facilities, oversees a team made up of just fourteen individuals, all responsible for ensuring that Riverbend’s ten facilities, housing nearly four hundred staff and over fifty residents, remain sanitized, safe, and welcoming for all. A hands-on supervisor, Nelson can be found working alongside his crew day in and day out.

Erin O’Connell, Director of Administrative Operations at Riverbend, oversees a team of thirty-five including Program Assistants, Benefit Specialists, Medical Records Specialists, Admissions Coordinators, and Office Managers. When explaining what her department does, O’Connell shares that, generally speaking, her team covers everything that’s known to the public as “patient access” - from client check-ins and scheduling, to financial services, and medical records - with Office Managers at each site overseeing the administrative functions.

For Nelson and O’Connell’s teams, some of the biggest adjustments they’ve faced in the past two years have been staffing arrangements for a group of essential workers who aren’t able to work from home and, like most organizations, navigating the repercussions of a nationwide staffing shortage. This has caused constant re-prioritization of essential tasks in an attempt to be as efficient and safe as possible with increasingly fewer resources. scheduled vacation, exposure to or contraction of Covid, or Covid-like symptoms. They don’t have the luxury of working from home; these guys show up every day. As soon we hear of a staff-person who’s contracted or been exposed to Covid, our guys deploy right away and start disinfecting. Due to all this extra work, they even come in on weekends to make sure other work is getting done,” shared Nelson.

“For a lot of my staff, they really have appreciated being in the office, but it has been a challenge when they have needed to be home. Due to Covid protocols it’s more complicated to do their jobs efficiently when they’re not in the office as we become limited with only a certain number of staff on site and what we’re able to accomplish in a day. I think the biggest challenge for us has been the recruitment and staffing, and chronically doing more work with fewer resources,” said O’Connell.

“The added work has included basic tasks like conducting Covid screenings and reminding folks of those protocols. Additionally, our scheduling has become a lot more complex since we’ve implemented telehealth. We’re having to manage the details of online appointments, and onboard and orient both clients and staff to those processes that many are just unfamiliar with. Some of

our work has become more extensive so we’ve had to reprioritize other items that we’d normally be taking care of. I think that’s been another one of the major challenges,” O’Connell explained.

ADMINISTRATIVE OPERATIONS*

CLIENT INTERACTIONS 2,200 PHONE CALLS 1,050 NEW CLIENT INQUIRIES: 120 MEDICAL RECORDS SCANNED SINCE MARCH

2020: 68,363 *DAILY AVERAGES TELEHEALTH & TELECOMMUNICATIONS USERS: 405

MEETINGS HELD: > 19,208 (WITH > 60,000 PARTICIPANTS) HOURS IN USE: > 47,619 *SINCE MARCH 2020