By Case Management
Generally, these are the best dressers in the entire hospital system. They’re also the people with the most overloaded clipboards and the deepest, broadest knowledge of differing insurance plans. One shoulder is higher than the other (from cradling the telephone receiver between ear and shoulder) and the right index finger is usually hyperdeveloped (from dialing the telephone).
Housekeeping/Engineering/Facilities Management
Perhaps the most important, least visible group in the hospital, these are the people (usually in scrubs but sometimes in ill-designed uniforms) who keep the place clean and running smoothly and the building from falling down.
I cannot stress this enough: If you work in a hospital, get to know the people who change the lightbulbs, scrub the floors and fix the broken monitors. Nine out of 10 things that go wrong in a hospital are environment-related, and knowing who to call can make a huge difference in how well your day goes. Also, please remember to say please and thank you to the invisible, overworked, underpaid people who clean up after you and fix things you’ve broken. Without them, nobody else could do anything.
Nutrition Services
This encompasses everything from the lunch-line ladies who grill your burger to the registered dietitians who wield the magical calculators and figure out how fast to run your patient’s tube feeding. This is, again, a hugely valuable and mostly invisible service. If your patient doesn’t eat, he or she won’t heal. If a patient eats the wrong things in the wrong amounts, very bad things can happen. And again, it’s worth your while to learn who it is that’s writing diet modification suggestions in the chart. Eventually you’ll have a question about PKU or galactosemia or whether you can get extra green beans on a diabetic tray; it’s good to know who to ask.
