Child Life Specialist -- A Job of My Very Own

So, today is an exciting day!  I just accepted a job with Rochester General Hospital!  We're going home!

So, here's the whole story . . . .

About 3 weeks before the end of my internship, I dropped an email to the Child Life Specialist I used to volunteer under back in 2001, to let her know my internship was wrapping up, and do you happen to have any openings in your department.  She didn't.  But she sent my info to someone else in her department, who was helping another hospital in town recruit a full-time CLS.  This recruiter liked my resume, and sent it on the Associate Chief of Pediatrics at Rochester General (RGH), who was spearheading the CL project there.

RGH is a moderately sized hospital on the edge of downtown Rochester, serving families from all over the area, but primarily under-served (aka:  poor urban) families.  It's an adult hospital with pediatric services:  inpatient unit with 25 beds (half adult, half peds), a pediatric ER that serves about 24K kids a year, and a primary care clinic that serves about 20K kids a year.  The peds team also has specialists in Adolescent Medicine, and Behavioral Pediatrics.  Additionally, there's a small Day Surgery Unit (tonsils, ear tubes, etc.)

The hospital does not currently have Child Life services, so they are looking for someone to come and start their program.  The first few years, it will be a "one man band" kind of deal.  Just me, for the whole hospital.  This is very do-able, but will require some careful balancing and extraordinary prioritizing skills.  Fortunately, these were emphasized in my internship.  Long term goals for my department include adding more CL staff as the peds dept in the hospital grows.  But that is years away.  Right now, it's all me.

This is an incredibly exciting opportunity, with tremendous growth potential. I think this will be one of the most challenging, and most rewarding experiences of my professional life.  While some of the MDs know about CL services (RGH shares docs and residents with the nearby children's hospital), none of the nurses have worked with CLS before.  So I think I'll end up spending my first 6 months running around the hospital (inpatient, ER and Clinic mostly) saying over and over again "please call me."  There will be a lot of staff education to help nurses learn what services i can offer, and why paging me to come work with their patient will be of such tremendous benefit.  i think once CL catches on, i'll spend the next 6 months say "you can't all be calling me at the same time!"  As I said, it's all about balance.

So, back to the story -- we left off with the Associate Chief of Peds, who's been the one working to get a CLS for her hospital.  She phone interviewed me during the last week of my internship, and invited me to fly up to Rochester to interview in person.  Excellent!

So, my internship ended Friday the 17th, and they fly me up the following Tuesday.  Since there was no CLS to interview me, they decided to have someone from each discipline interview me!  So, for two days, I met with one person after another (including Chief of Peds, Chief of Nursing, nurse manager, ER doc, Clinic doc, special projects, social worker, doc from behavior peds, etc.)  it was a whirlwind.  9 parts exciting, 1 part overwhelming.  At the end of the second day of interviews, met back with the Chief of Peds again, who has the final say.  We talked a bit more, and then he offered me the job on the spot!

WOOT!

The catch -- since the hospital doesn't currently have CL, the HR dept didn't know what to offer for compensation.  so they had to do market research before they could make me a compensation offer.  So, I flew back to Atlanta Saturday, knowing the job was mine, but not how much they could pay me to take on this opportunity/challenge.

I've spent the intervening time wondering if the offer would be enough to make moving my family worth it.  Matthew, sweet man, was more than willing to support my new career, and agreed to move the family if the offer was at all reasonable.  So, I sat, staring at my phone, willing it to ring.  Which it finally did this morning.

The offer was great, and I called Matthew.  Within 5 minutes I called RGH back to accept.  It's official!  SQUEEEE!  So, Rochester, here we come!

Meanwhile, Matthew is looking into his job opportunities in Rochester, and I'm working with a realtor to see if we can afford to buy a home right away.

And that's the news!