What is your job title/your role at Scottish Rite for Children?  
Medical Social Worker

What do you do on a daily basis or what sort of duties do you have at work? 
Admissions/Discharge Planning – This can involve many different things, such as transportation, lodging, plan of care during recovery, coordination between home health companies, medical equipment companies and supply companies. It also involves quite a bit of coordination with outside health care providers, such as outpatient therapies.

Assessments – Social workers do several different types of assessments with families (i.e., psychosocial assessments, international patient assessments, transition planning, and complex-care pre-surgical planning assessments – just to name a few). Essentially, we do in-depth assessments with families to get a better understanding of their home life. Everything from the physical location and structure where they live, to patient/family strengths, access to care, support systems, barriers to any of their needs, and we then use that in the multidisciplinary team and with community resources to ensure our patients can get the care and services they need.

Crisis Intervention – Social workers step in to meet with families that are experiencing different types of crises. Sometimes the families just need someone to listen and provide supportive counseling and other times, social workers identify more urgent needs/concerns that require more intensive social work intervention.

Holiday Assistance – This time of year, our team spends a lot of time managing the holiday assistance programs that Scottish Rite offers. We receive all the requests that come into the organization for holiday assistance – which on an average year is a little more than 100 families, or about 400 children under the age of 18. Along with helping the team sort through gifts and family requests for assistance, one of my specific responsibilities with holiday assistance is to build and maintain the program that receives, stores and manages the holiday assistance request information.

Schwartz Rounds – I have the privilege of being one of the coordinators for Schwartz Rounds here at Scottish Rite.

What was your first job? What path did you take to get here or what led you to Scottish Rite? How long have you worked here?
My first job was bagging groceries at a small family grocery store. After leaving home, I obtained my bachelor’s in Business Administration from East Texas Baptist University. I always knew I wanted to work in pediatric mental health/counseling and originally thought I would pursue my degree and licensing in counseling. However, I followed the advice of several mentors to get my degree and license in social work. I could still do counseling, but with a master’s degree in social work, I could be licensed to do far more than just counseling. I completed my master’s in Social Work at the University of Texas at Arlington, and after obtaining my license, I first went to work for Parkland’s Labor & Delivery Department. I then worked at Cook Children’s Medical Center in Fort Worth for several years before I joined Scottish Rite in 2015.

What do you enjoy most about Scottish Rite?
I most enjoy that I work on a true team. Not just as an organizational group, but as a team that pools their different skills and expertise together to produce a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Tell us something about your job that others might not already know. 
The Family Services department is actually a rather small department. The entire institution is covered by just eight social workers. Five main social workers in Dallas, two in Frisco, and one in the Family Resource Center. Each social worker is responsible for covering around eight – 10 physicians’/teams’ patients.

What was the best vacation you ever took and why?
The best vacation I ever took was a school trip during undergrad in 2004. My college choir was invited by the Russian Ministry of Culture to tour with the Moscow Chamber Orchestra to perform at the 300th anniversary celebration of the founding of St. Petersburg. We got to see and perform in really beautiful and amazing places in Russia.

Do you collect anything? How did you start?
I love baseball, and every Christmas I still receive that year’s complete set of Topps Baseball cards.

Do you play any sports or instruments?
I’ve played piano since I was 8.