Journal Entry 1

9/22/09

9.30am – 12.30pm

My first clinical day with my preceptor was a very informative session. She outlined a general overview of her responsibilities as a facility administrator, some of which includes formulation and implementation of new policies and objectives and establishing procedures for specific department. Additionally, she is in charge of creating the hiring policy, hiring and evaluating employees, finance management and develops reports, quality assurance, sets budgets and oversees payroll and facility maintenance. As the facility administrator, she has to report to area operation director (in charge of all the other facility within the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex). Julie pointed out that she had a daily to do list which is subject to change/revision as the need be. In other to keep track of this, she would progress down the checklist.
Today our set objective on financial management
Our goal is focused on how to achieve productivity ratio as well as budget target for operational goals though the use and/or implementation of the appropriate tools. To achieve this, Julie started off by reviewing the weekly budget proposal against the personnel, scheduling needs and patient load. She showed me how the clinical supervisor has to draft the staff schedule to meet the patient load and stay within the clinic allocated hours as designated from the facilities operation.

At 10.30am, she had a brief meeting with the entire clinical supervisor to go over any unit complaints and request that needed her approval. This meeting was more like an open forum where the clinical supervisors get to voice out there ideas on how to improve efficiency to achieve target clinical goals and other issues. She requested for the minutes of the meeting so as to review all the highlighted points at the end of the day. She then moved on to review the previous week’s inventory management (purchasing, product selection and supply usage) with the administrative assistant. She identified some problems with the utilization of material/resource (cancelled labs due to inappropriate entry of requisition/orders) in one of the unit and immediately sent an email to clinical supervisor on the issues. Our final task for the day was to a treatment chart audit to ensure that patient and treatment charge information as well as other related data was accurate and submitted to the corporate office in a timely manner. Any deficiencies noted was highlight and would be discussed with at the next monthly team mates mandatory meetings.

At the end of the reviews, I had a 10mins post conference to discuss some of my questions, my perception of the overall experience and the next objective for day 2. We planned that in addition to objective 2, I would assist/ independently plan, audit some of the budget review we went over.