After a technical glitch temporarily cut them off from their customers, caregivers at the Intermountain medical equipment office in Logan went the extra mile to be sure 75 calls were returned and they had met the needs of every patient who reached out to them that day.
When the Intermountain Homecare and Hospice, Medical Equipment team in Logan arrived at work one morning recently they discovered their phones and internet connections were down. They didn’t know, at first, it was a problem only their internet provider could fix and it would take until 2 p.m. to get up and running. The four-member team did know their customers were depending on them. They wouldn’t let them down.
Joshua Van Ekelenburg, the manager of the store, started by using his personal phone as a hotspot to get on the internet and see the orders that had been placed.
“That way we weren’t missing important oxygen orders or hospice orders,” he says.
Even if an outage cuts off power to the home oxygen concentrators some of their patients need, Joshua’s team has already made sure that they all have emergency portable backup tanks they can use. And yet Joshua says his team has the attitude if someone needs something taken care of that’s important to them, it’s important to his team too.
Some customers who couldn’t reach them had called other phone numbers at Logan Regional Hospital. Logan Regional caregivers passed on those messages to Joshua’s team by calling their personal phones.
The phones finally came back on at 2 p.m. and they had about 75 voice mails waiting to be answered. Joshua’s team went to work returning phone calls, says Bus Earl, home medical equipment assistant and team lead. They don’t often get more than four or five voice mails backed up because they can usually catch calls as they come in, he says. With the help of delivery drivers on the team, they took care of everyone in need by 8 p.m., Joshua says.
Joshua says his staff knew what they had to do and nobody was expecting to leave at 5 p.m. All four of them, including Joshua, wanted to work until the job was done and every patient had what they needed.
“I’ve never had to go out in these kind of circumstances and say, ‘Could somebody please stay a little bit later?’” he says. “Everybody just steps up and takes care of things. That day we all just divvied up the messages, so we could get through them faster.”
Stephanie Grant, home medical equipment assistant, says it’s not uncommon for someone to stay late to take care of a customer but they hadn’t ever dealt with anything like this before.
“It was just a given we’d stay late because we knew it had to be done before we could go,” Stephanie says. “It’s our job to take care of our patients, so that’s what we did.”
Ty Duersch, home medical equipment assistant, says they were focused on their goal because they care about their patients.
“All of us here in the office took it on ourselves to make sure everyone got called back, so everyone was able to get the oxygen or the equipment they needed,” he says.
Joshua says his team takes pride in doing the best job they can.
“We’re constantly working to improve and do things better,” he says. “We’re very open to ideas here. Anybody can submit an idea if they think something will work better or something needs to be done differently.”