On the road, literally

Wow, the past month has whizzed past from spending hours on the freeway and days making Powerpoint presentations. For the KRISP Project (see the blog list for a link), I've been creating and then delivering weekly 2-3hour "trainings" for employees at two of the local health departments that are participating in the project. The amount of effort needed equals that for teaching a graduate course, but more intense in terms of the effort needed to meet the health department "where they are".

Our customer-focus and accommodating approach has resulted in weekly trips to deliver the trainings. The trip is 6 hours, round-trip, through two of the five Cook County collar counties, and then the cornfields of Illinois. There is no bus or train that goes were we need to be. So, I'm becoming familiar with where the highway patrol like to wait for the speeders.

We briefly covered doing community assessment via MAPP. Most of the effort has been on teaching the staff how to do quality improvement. When I wrote the grant, I had not imagined the amount of effort it would take to gain access to the public health nurses, nor did I imagine the need for so much face-to-face teaching time. I naively thought I'd just step and and things would get done. Not so. These are slow moving, if not well intending, organizations with lots of competition for their attention.

Over the past couple of weeks, overseeing and managing this project has again brought up the awareness of the timing as both a curse and a blessing.  On the cursed side, I wrote the grant before the economy went bad, before the H1N1 outbreak, before the states failed to make payments to the local health departments, and before the health departments had to lay off half of the staff. How, under those conditions, can I possibly make any difference in the empowerment and valuing of public health nurses? How can I possibly meet my grant objectives? Will all these trainings really translate into improvement in health?

On the bright side, the project has been a blessing. We are able to be a compassionate sounding board  and  give moral support to the nursing directors. We are able to validate that the nurses are important enough to receive this special attention. We have given hope to public health nurses throughout Washington state and rekindled their enthusiasm for who they are and what they do.  We have acknowledged the nurses as lifelong learners facing a strange new work landscape.  

In writing the non-competing grant renewal, I did realize that we have done a lot in the past year. Naturally, I tend to see the work ahead and the gas bills staying high. But, to be honest, there's a part of me too that's renewed and rekindled.