T-TAP: Project Search

Susie Rutkowski: We started about 9 years ago when Erin Riehle, who was then the director of the emergency department at Children's, called Great Oaks and Hamilton County Board of MRDD and asked for a person with a disability to work in the emergency department. We got started with one young lady with down syndrome. Since then, it's progressed to about 60 folks working at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, a high school transition program, and other programs as well.

Interviewer: Susie, you mentioned that there are currently 60 people working within the hospital. Could you describe for the listener how that works within the hospital setting?

Susie Rutwowski: Hospitals are really a microcosm of the working world. If you think of the hospital in that way and think of all the possibilities that there are for different kinds of jobs, the possibilities are really endless. Also, in a hospital, you have about 70% of the staff as professionals and about 30% of the staff as support people. We really try to capture a lot of those support positions. We have tried to steer away from many of the traditional jobs that you might think of for folks with disabilities in food service and environmental services. Not that those are bad jobs or meaningless jobs; they are not. We have started to use those jobs in the last few years. But during our first couple of years, we were very conscious of that and tried to deliberately explore different kinds of nontraditional jobs.

We have several people in clinical sterilization, where they sterilize all of the trays used for the operations. We have a young lady that has been there about 7 years. She sterilizes all of the trays for any of the ear tube, tonsillectomy and general operations that would happen there at the hospital. These trays probably have 200 instruments on them and have to be done very specifically. What we have found is that people with [the most significant] disabilities can do very complex jobs. If they are systematic and routine, then we can be very successful at training someone. And, they can keep that job for a very long period of time.

So, we've explored what areas of the hospital that have those kinds of systematic, routine, but complex jobs. We are in sterilization in the kitchen, the recovery rooms, the emergency department. We're in many of the offices doing things like auditing nurses' pain charts. We stock many of the patient floors. We send e-cards to young patients at the hospital. We are the main source of couriers for the hospital. We have clusters of jobs as well as single jobs. We work in the lab doing anything that can support the main work of the hospital. We have two patient transporters. So, we do things that support the hospital and also some direct patient care.

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