Special Project(s)

For the past few weeks, I have been working on different projects in my internship--apart from clinical, management, and community rotations. The projects were assigned to us by one of our internship directors, Bridget. I was on a team with two other interns, Cindy and Amy, and we were told that we had to complete four tasks in two weeks:

• Create a handout for patients who have a sodium or potassium restriction. Patients are put on these restrictions for a number of different reasons, and find it difficult to order off the menu when they do not know how much sodium or potassium are in certain items. The handout was supposed to make this process easier for the patient, and for the call center employees who take their order.
• Enter values for missing nutritional components in CBORD. CBORD is a computer database where all information about food items and recipes is stored. Most items are linked to a nutrient profile on the USDA website, but some had to be entered in manually. Because the hospital has signed on to Michelle Obama's Partnership for Healthier America, it has to prove that we are abiding by certain guidelines. Those guidelines state that trans fat should not be existent in at least 60% of food items by the year 2015. However, with the food items that were entered in manually, most did not contain values for trans fat. Therefore, a day and a half was spent looking on food labels and on our food distributor's website to find these values. You'll be happy to know that most did not contain any trans fat :)
• Re-evaluate the current in-room dining system and request changes, if necessary. Bridget told us that the management staff was hoping to open the in-room dining menu to make it the same as the already existing patient menu. In addition, they wanted to know if it would be cost-effective to offer this service to all guests of patients. We found that financially-speaking, this was likely a possibility. Logistically, it would be difficult in terms of space, work load for current employees, and the need for a larger work force in order to make this possible. We put together a presentation and get to show it to Doug and Bridget tomorrow afternoon.
• Make instructional videos. We made two videos: Coumadin and Your Diet and Ordering from A La Carte. We wrote, acted, directed, and edited these videos--and I am pretty positive they are obviously done by amateurs--but the point is...we did our best! We even made a Blooper video, which was the best part of all. (The point of me writing all this was originally to upload the blooper video, but it doesn't work because of the type of file :( Sorry!)

Overall, we had a very productive week. We were able to complete all our assigned tasks rather quickly and for the most part, had a lot of fun doing so!