Children's Mercy Kansas City: Administrative Fellowship Review, Valentina Vasquez

<p>hello everyone this is Cole from the American Journal of healthc care strategy I'm joined this evening by Valentina Valentina please introduce yourself hello there I am Valentina Vasquez I am a current administrative fellow at Children's Mercy Kansas City my fellowship is a one-year program and I'm about eight months in I started in July and it's been a great experience so far and I'm kind of in the midst right now figuring out what comes after a fellowship [Music] so happy to have you on and it's such an exciting time for you going back to the very beginning of your career or your educational career you got a Bachelor's in public health and then you got your mha why did you not get an mph why instead did you get an mha yeah for sure so I got my public health degree in the midst of the pandemic so the my junior year the covid-19 pandemic started and I transitioned fully um online for the end of uh my my time at the University of Oklahoma so I moved back in with my parents I got my practicum with the Oklahoma State Department of Health and while I was working with them I gained a lot of Public Health experience of course and strategy experience and one of the things that I learned is especially while you're young you have so many ideas and you want to continually in innovate it can be difficult to do so in an environment where maybe that isn't appreciated as much or you know there are a lot of barriers in red tape in order to accomplish a lot of the goals that you have so instead of continuing in kind of the public health realm and working for the state I decided that I wanted to transition and go back to being fully focused on Hospital work because my original intention when I went to college was to be a doctor and to be some sort of pediatrician but that did not end up working out so I uh transitioned to Public Health my sophomore year junior year the pandemic started and then by my senior year had pretty much decided that I was going to transition to more of the hospital Administration side of thing that makes sense and that is a very familiar story it's actually similar to myself it was first Premed and I've switched around a bunch of times but that public health was kind of the next step and then that meshing of Public Health and the actual like operations is where I kind of found my home so I get where you're coming from there now one of the questions I have is you mentioned that when you went in you wanted to be a pediatrician so where did that interest in uh Children's Health Care start yeah for sure so I am an older sister and that is one of the pillars of my character that I hold very strongly and very dearly in my heart I watched my little sister grow up she's four years younger than me but I still remember when she was born I would go to all of her you know first appointments and the doctor that she had was so great and she involved me in the appointment so I got to listen to my little sister's heart I got to look into her ears and we would talk about you know how a baby was developing and from a very very young age she instilled that passion in me and growing up I always loved being around kids and then actually during the pandemic I was able to Nanny two twins who both had speech and hearing issues as well as Vision issues and getting to see how their family navigated through the Health Care System also was one of the things that pushed me to be on the hospital Administration side because I know that helping families is really a pillar of what we do as administrators as well as helping the physician absolutely wonderful experiences that you had and then you got an internship an administrative internship at St Jude was it challenging to get that internship and how specific were you in applying for internships did you only look for those at Children's Hospitals no actually the first one that I applied to was probably about two months before I applied for the St Jude one it was with an adult Health System I went out and did my interview in person with them and I realized pretty quickly that that wasn't the environment that I wanted to be in not just because it was an adult hospital but I think the way that their executive team work together was just something that I wouldn't have meshed well with so decided not to take that internship two months later I was actually doing research on ad Myster to fellowships for my graduate research assistantship um and I was literally looking at a list of all the hospitals in the US and typing their name and then administrative fellowship and I got to St Jude Children's Research Hospital administrative fellowship and their administrative internship came up and I think I had about three weeks to put my application together and thankfully my program is super supportive my professors were able to write letters of recommendation for me um and I was able to get that submitted and then they have a very seamless um process they review all their applications and then about mid January they start doing interviews and it was an hourlong interview the first 30 minutes was with their strategy team and the second 30 minutes was with their Finance team there was about three to four people in each of those calls the questions that they asked were very introductory and you know very basic level interview questions knowing that we were graduate students and probably incredibly nervous so I felt really confident I think one of the best parts about my story and kind of how I've been able to develop professionally is that I've had so many great storytelling moments in my life and I'm really able to encapsulate that when I'm having interviews and talking to different people so I made sure that I was really prepared for that interview and it went great I think I I loved getting to to learn from them as well because I think that's a really key part of an interview is making sure that you ask them questions and do research on them and they um are one of the institutions that posts their strategic plan so I was able to go through and actually read all the pillars of their strategic plan and ask specific questions about that which then in turn once I got the internship a lot of my projects stemmed from the questions that I asked in that interview so interviewing is a skill that you and that that is one of the unique ones I haven't heard that mention too often and that's great that you mentioned it interviewing is a skill that you've worked on a lot and that you're very good at and that's where you've been able to see success so that I think excellent advice is to focus on telling your story and there so many people with amazing stories that I've talked to as well so that's that's excellent I wanted to ask you mentioned that you didn't think you'd mesh well with that first that first team how do you identify people who you do mesh well with it's challenging to do that for myself when I'm early in the career sometimes I just kind of you know do whatever whatever works is what I go with but you're saying that you know you have an established Vision that you were looking for can you explain what that was like yeah and I'll actually give you like the specific example of what I use in interviews to kind of Define that for myself so excent at the very end at the very end of every interview that I have I ask the interviewer if they have any hesitations for me being the most qualified candidate that they've interviewed for that position and that not only puts them on the spot because they have to like think of what they're going to say and like what are they going to say to this you know this poor girl that's applying for this position but it it tells it tells me very quickly are they able to be candid with me are they able to give me real in time feedback to how I'm interviewing how I'm answering questions my experiences how I'm fitting into the expectation that they have in their head for this position and if they're able to be candid and give that feedback without you know all the fluff pieces of wording that we add to try to make people feel better I feel very comfortable with that and there may be people that don't feel comfortable with that and may not be able to ask a question that bold but I have seen literally firsthand asking that question starts a mentorship relationship where I'm able to come to that person vulnerably and get real feedback from them with them knowing that I'm just trying to learn I'm trying to grow as a professional and uh it's something that really that really matters to me is that I have their trust and their confidence and their candidness that is really important how did you know why are you good at handling that how how do you handle that so well I think the majority of the responses that I've gotten stem from misconceptions about something that I said during the interview so it actually gives me the opportunity to clarify what I actually meant what my point actually was and then in turn we're able to have another conversation on something that really matters to them because I know it stood out to them so I don't know it's worked out so far maybe sometime I'm gonna get my feelings hurt and I'm never gonna ask that question again but it's worked out for me so far I think maybe because you're a humble you know you're a humble individual that helps I remember mine it was interesting because it was like somebody said that it looks like I all I wanted to do is work in insurance and I was like I don't only want to so I had I went and edited my resume again and then this past one somebody said I jump around rolls too much but I had the same company just I got promoted so like I need to fix this so it doesn't look uh like bad but it was critical critical advice and I was like wow I really need to fix that I just it it is impressive I guess the the level of you know humility that you're able to to cultivate and I think that that's an important thing for uh people who are going into the mha program because I've spoken to people who are even older they're in their 40s and that humility has helped them out a lot you know even though they're 40 years old or 35 years old they still act like they're brand new to things and I think that's something that it kind of shows that you know you you have that and you've been able to take that criticism and then turn it into mentorship relationships that's incredible yeah I love that Cole and to add just one more thing time is back to administrative fellowships asking a question like that shows to the interviewer that you were somebody who is willing to learn from your mistakes willing to learn from you know maybe guests and experience that you have that is something that is key to an administrative fellow being able to acknowledge that you don't know everything that you're not you know this perfect human being that's going to come in and change that executive team's entire perspective on the world that's not the case right so being able to be humble and come into that scenario saying you know I want to learn I'm just trying to grow professionally I think is a key point to being an administrative fellow applicant I I hope I can learn how to navigate that before grad school's over and before I start applying for those so maybe something to bring up with my with my therapist for sure that that does seem very important and so after you you know you did this internship for uh for four months right four or five months or so and then three months oh three months oh okay three months okay nice so not that long though but it seems like you based on the description I read on LinkedIn you did a lot while you were there very impactful yeah it was incredible I will talk about my experience at St Jude for the rest of my life because it really was the best experience I could have asked for as an ative intern so going in they don't have an administrative fellowship program so they treat their interns but I would consider a lot of Health Systems treat their administrative fellows so we were given you know top level exposure from day one I mean I'm not kidding I got my badge and an hour later I was on a call uh for one of the like most important projects I worked on the entire summer and I was like oh my goodness like this is hit the ground I'm so excited to be here and I think yeah I I I was only there for 12 weeks but I was able to work on about 10 different projects both incredibly handson and some just being able to Shadow what the project was doing and kind of looking through the project Charter but yeah I think also the other part of my experience at St Jude that I want to speak about is being able to work with leaders that are willing to teach you and coach you in real time on you know how to do a lot of the things that you only know conceptually from class but want to be as helpful with in actual practice um so like one of the projects I got to work on was a community health needs assessment which I had experience on because I was a public health um undergraduate student and got to kind of see that process along but going in and actually creating pillars and um having conversations with large groups and having con condense information is something that you need to really work on in person so getting to do that was incredible and then one of my favorite projects that I worked on at St Jude was actually a security project um for their facility master plan I really just got to interview with the security team they hired Consultants to come in and kind of do an evaluation of all of the security features at St Jude and getting to follow that process along has made me look at buildings and host hospitals in a completely different way since that day so yeah so if we go back again you you know the bachelor in public health you had that practical experience with Oklahoma State Department of Health you have this incredible administrative internship and then you get your mha and then you start the fellowship with this Fellowship was it a was it really hard was it drastically different from everything you've done or were you like very prepared and able to handle things or somewhere in between what was that like um I think coming in I had an incredibly long summer before I started the administrative Fellowship so I graduated from my mha program at OU a week later I got married and then I spent about three weeks on both my honeymoon and a family vacation I moved States and then I went to the Taylor Swift concert over the summer and literally two days later I started working as the administrative fellow so I came in kind of needing a break for my hectic home life and really structure of my job and one of the reasons I feel like my experience at Children's Mercy has been so great is because we are given so much autonomy and what we're able to do our entire Fellowship structure really is dependent on us and what we're wanting it to be so I was able to sit at the beginning of the year with a list of all of our departments and outline how much time I was going to spend in each area what the key pillars I wanted to get out of those areas were and then start meeting all the leaders that I'd be interacting with for the year um so that's kind of the structure of our fellowship is it's more rotation based and the projects come along with the mentorship relationships that you build wonderful that is that is sounds like an incredible experience and so does your summer that's I'm actually jealous of the Taylor Swift concert there so it sounds like a an amazing fellowship program what were your favorite rotations that you've done so far yeah oh my goodness I've had so many incredible experiences everywhere that I've gone so um just to give you the scale we do about 7 der rotations through the year uh right now I'm in mid-60s so I'm almost done I'll be done hopefully by the first week of April um and my favorite one so far has been with our Critical Care transport team I think this is back in August maybe early September I was able to go out with our Critical Care transport team to Pi up a patient in our helicopter and before we even started the day I really had so many questions around the mental health impact of the role that they play for our hospital because they see the highest secuity as patients that we have and you know we were able to have such a meaningful conversation about the support system that we have at Children's Mercy the support system that they have for their own team and kind of all of the experience that they've had in their career because I was with people that have been in critical care transport roles for almost over 30 years um and I felt so good about you know the conversation that we had had and um of course they talked about the the hardships that they have to face in being able to do their job and but they felt so good and they they love what they do and I remember one of the people that I was shadowing with that day said you know I would never do anything else in my life like I will retire from this position I love my job J so much and so we started off the day we get on the helicopter we go pick up that patient and it was a patient who was end of life and we were bringing her to Children's Mercy for end of life care and it was incredibly difficult to have that conversation with the parents of you know we have to take your kiddo about two and a half hours from where you live to start the process for you know hospice care and you know they were so brave the entire time and I was holding back tears talking to this dad who was crying because his little girl had never flown before and this was going to be her first time flying and our team was so supportive and were able to immediately connect with the family to make sure that they felt safe in the decision that they were making and when we got back to the hospital we transferred that patient off to our piku team which everything went so well and we were able to kind of debrief in the hallway and they were they were saying to me that these are are the hard days the days where you've done everything you can and you know that you've brought them to the absolute best place for care but you can't save every single little kid that we see and that you know it really makes an impact on you especially on the administrative side to make sure that you're doing everything in your power for our Frontline workers to have the best experiences in their roles to feel the most supportive in their roles um and to make sure that they feel like when they're out there doing their job there's somebody back at home or at the hospital that's looking out for them and doing everything possible for them to be successful so that has been by far my greatest experience I've also had great experiences elsewhere I have learned how to clean a room and disinfect it properly with our EVS team I've learned all about food regulation in our cafeteria which I was fascinated by I realized when I showed up for my food services rotation that I'd never been in a public kitchen where food is created for a lot of people and I got to learn so much that day I spent time in our niku and our piku and our cicu I've gone out to our clinics and visited with several nurse managers I've had an incredible year so far and I'd say every rotation brings its own hardships and also its own lessons so i' I've felt great this year I've uh never really heard a fellowship experience quite like that so that's uh inspiring in the 60 Fellowship 60 rotations you said right that 70 rotations 70 unbelievable that is uh a tremendous amount so that's a little over like one and a quarter a week right yeah so I we have it split right now into two different sections there's core rotations and then exploratory rotations so your cor core rotations are more of Hospital operations chronic care rotations and then you transition to exploratory which which is more of the business side of the hospital so when I was doing my core rotations there were several days where I was doing more than one and even coming in on the weekends to see our weekend team and see how they operate so for our spiritual Services team I got to come in on the weekend to see how they take care of things while the rest of their team is out and it's only one person so so you really have a good grasp of every pretty much Department yeah definitely I don't think that there's a single leader I haven't met maybe on the uh research side I haven't met everybody but definitely on the hospital side um Hospital operation side and clinical care side I think I've met just about every administrative leader so do you think uh you want to stay with the same institution or do you want to move to you know different area what is that looking like for you yeah definitely you know I'm a tremendous homebody and I've actually grown worse uh the older that I've gotten I grew up most of my life in Tulsa and that's where my parents are right now and where my husband's family is as well and I think as much fun and as many incredible experiences as I've had at Children's Mercy I think I'll be transitioning back home here soon in um by the end of June early July although you know that's not Crystal Clear just yet how that'll end up you know we still have several months and several weeks left to make a final decision but I would be more than excited to stay with Children's Mercy especially at being an independent Children's Hospital which is something that matters so much to me when we're talking about strategic planning and we're talking about the way that the hospital functions it's been great to have that experience and to add that to my resume but but yeah I think my heart is back in Oklahoma and that is funny for me to say because I've lived on both coasts I moved to Memphis for the summer that I got to work for St Jude I've lived in South America and in Central America and somehow my heart belongs to Tulsa Oklahoma so so we could pick up the hospital and plop it in Tulsa that would be the dream I I would love to pick up children's unity and drop it in Tulsa Oklahoma you know what what do you like about uh Tulsa oh my goodness now I moved to Tulsa when I was 10 years old so 2010 and I've really gotten to see the city grow into something completely different than when I was there um I mean downtown has been fully reconfigured in the last 10 years 15 years and also my parents live out in the suburbs and the area that we grew up in is so different it has grown so much but I think really like I'm gonna say I think Oklahoma's the South but like the southern hospitality of everybody that you meet in Oklahoma and the neighbors that you have is something that I really truly appreciate and and it's something that I missed I think I think also like just again going back to being a homebody like I miss the restaurants that I grew up going to I miss the church that I grew up going to so so yeah I think that's something that's drawing me back well thanks for coming on and sharing this all with us Valentina I couldn't be more appreciative I know we stayed later than uh we usually do but I appreciate you being so accommodating and and joining us to share your story thank you Cole I appreciate you reaching out and I'm happy to help any that's interested in pursuing an administrative Fellowship</p>