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Interviewer: I would be interested
in learning more about the types of jobs that you have available.
For instance, are these jobs that have typical job descriptions?
Or, have you had experience in customizing a job for someone with
a more significant disability?
Susie Rutkowski: I'll address
both customizing a job and a regular job from a job description.
But, in terms of customizing, we've been able to do some of that.
Some has come from different experiences at the hospital, or different
things at the hospital that have happened where they have needs
that they have to fill. For instance, the hospital has to maintain
all the refrigerators at a certain temperature. This wasn't a job
that was getting done well, because the nurses weren't able to get
to it. As you can imagine at Children's Hospital, there are hundreds
of refrigerators throughout the hospital. So, we were able to build
a job around taking the temperatures of all the different refrigerators
to make surethat they fall within certain temperature ranges and
recording that data to make sure that they were correct. That's
one of the jobs that we were able to customize. [If you find] ways
to accommodate that position, find the technology that's needed
to do the job, and a person can do that job.
Other jobs did stem directly from a job description, for example
our jobs in clinical sterilization. There are lots of people that
work in clinical sterilization. I don't even know how many people
are in that department, but we have three people with disabilities
working in that department.
When Jill first started in that job, and she
has been there about 6 or 7 years now, she started with sterilinzing
the more general trays. So instead of having her learn 30 different
trays, she started her job only learning 4 or 5 different trays.
Now, 7 years later, she knows most of the trays anyone else does.
We were able to take that very large array of instruments and hone
that down a little for her as she began her job. Now, she is very
much like any other person in that department.
We also did some other unique things to help
her retain that job. We gave Jill homework, and she has worked steadily
with her parents every time that she has a new tray to learn. She
has review time where she actually reviews the different instruments,
and how they are laid out. We built a picture book for her using
a digital that shows the difference between all the different instruments
that she might need to put together in a tray. She doesn't really
use that book anymore. But anytime we have a change or a new tray
that she is learning, we build a book for her.
We can either customize a job or take a job that comes from the
standard job description and do some tweaking to that job. Then,
we build supports as we train for that job. So people can learn
it and have a way to retain that information. It’s almost
a reference for them as another support system. As they're working
and if they need a refresher or reminder, they can go to that. It’s
no different then you or I have on our jobs. We have little secrets
or ways that we have of going back to references on our own jobs.
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