Summer Internships: Iowa City VA Hospital

By Tim Goody

During the summer I worked as a Human Resources Intern at the Iowa City VA Hospital. My two major projects for the summer are to conduct a 100% audit of all employee Competency folders (approximately 1400) in preparation for a Joint Commission survey and a Customer satisfaction report. For the first project, the employee competency folders are required by the Joint Commission to validate all employees are competent in their duties. By Joint Commission standards all competency must be validated every three years but the VA guidelines dictate they are validated on an annual basis. Because the VA has this standard Joint Commission holds all VA facilities to this standard. Outside of validating the completion of these folders I was also tasked with standardizing the process enterprise wide as there is a large variation on how each department completes this task. In the standardization of this process I created a training outlined that I used at a supervisors forum to educate all supervisors (approximately 80 individuals attended over two days) on the correct process and documentation.

My second major project was to conduct a process improvement plan for the Human Resources department. In this project I job shadowed all the department heads for at least half a day in order to better understand their jobs and roles within the organization. While conducting these job shadows I also interviewed each department head in order to better understand their relationship with Human Resources. In this interview I was attempting to better understand the customer service they receive and how that can be improved. Once all these interviews are completed I will complete a report for the Human Resources officer detailing what services are provided an acceptable manner and what area’s  need improvement along with recommendation on how to complete these improvements.

Along with these two scheduled projects I took the initiative to create a third project for myself. In this project I am conducting a PDSA cycle in the creation of electronic competency folders. In my time at the Iowa City VA I most likely will not be able to complete the PDSA cycle in this project because it will take at minimum one year to complete. In this project I am working with the Chief of Staff’s Administrative Officer to develop the Plan on this project and the creation of the electronic documentation. Once this is complete we will present this to the senior leadership of the organization in order to gain their approval on the project as well as gain a senior leadership champion for the project. Once we have this completed we will roll the project out in a single department to study its effectiveness, and create follow up actions to improve the projects and roll it out to several departments.  There is some belief if this is successful within the organization it could be pushed out to the other facilities within the region.

In between these three projects I have had access to other HR actions such as disciplinary actions involving the union (including terminations), hiring of staff, FMLA (Family Medical Leave Act) request, and other miscellaneous HR functions.