Advice For a Younger Me: If Only I Had Known...
Twenty-two years ago I was loaned by Maricopa Medical Center to help get a new clinic going for St. Vincent de Paul . I had just finished my master’s in health services administration and was fascinated with how you take a vision and turn it into a reality. I learned that it takes a lot of hard work and help from a lot of people! When we opened the new clinic on the main campus in the spring of 1994, our goal was to do 5,000 visits a year. Now, we’re up to 17,000 services a year. We’ve been so fortunate to have so many great volunteers and donors over the years, because I’ve learned that while it’s easy to start a clinic, it’s very hard to sustain one. Here are a few more important lessons I’ve learned over the many years…
1. St. Vincent de Paul is not in the healthcare business. It is a charity looking for a need to fill, and that need is healthcare.
We’re not here to keep providing healthcare. We’re here to continue to fill needs that aren’t being met in the community. It’s a very different approach than a normal clinic. We’re in the charity business, not the healthcare business. I didn’t understand this in the beginning. I thought, ‘We have food. People need food. Why can’t we just connect the two? Why do we need to insert a conference (food pantry) with a home visit?’ But I understand now. We have to make sure we deliver healthcare in the same fashion. We don’t want to miss out on the ‘home visit.’ People will always be hungry; people will always need food. But we can impact them in a different way through that home visit, through that interpersonal connection. We don’t ever want to provide healthcare without the ‘home visit.’ It’s a very important piece to understand.
2. When you have enough to give, have a bountiful mindset.
That’s a hard one for us because we’re used to operating on donations, and we use them quickly. My attitude is that if someone comes in and they need something, let’s have a bountiful mindset and help them out, rather than keeping things to ourselves because we might run out. In the end, we have to be confident that more [donations] will come in. The flip side is, we also have to be careful with our resources. We have to be good stewards of our resources from both sides.
3. Luck is being prepared to take advantage of opportunity.
That’s one of my mottos. I truly believe it. A perfect example of this is the children’s dental program. We tried to do this program in the beginning. It didn’t work. But in 1996, school-based healthcare centers were just starting and they needed dental care for kids. Since we had always wanted to serve kids, we were prepared. The opportunity came and it was a marriage that lasted for 19 years. When opportunity comes, you need to be ready for it. It may come in a different form than what you were expecting and from out of the blue, but when you recognize it – bingo, it’s a marriage.
4. If you have trouble making a decision, ask more questions.
I agonized a lot over decisions, going back and forth. But I realized it helped to ask more questions to better understand. Just keep asking more questions. We have to make a lot of decisions here, for example, whether we help a patient or not, or how far to go with treating someone. Learning more helps with each decision. I think it applies to a lot of things in life.
Bonus Lesson: My personal motto is, “Today we bloom, tomorrow we die.” It’s my talisman and it says it right here on my necklace, which I wear daily. It reminds me to live for the day. It’s not about yesterday and it’s not about tomorrow. We should always ask, what have we done today?
Janice Ertl is the Clinic Director at SVdP and will retire at the end of 2015. She is married and has one daughter, who is 21. She loves to bike, garden and travel. After retiring, she plans to learn how to play the banjo, something she has always wanted to do.
