From Provider to Patient and Back Again: Contessa’s Culture of Caring
When Michele Montoya, RN joined Contessa as an Acute Care Registered Nurse (ACRN) for the hospital-at-home joint venture with Mount Sinai Health System, she didn’t expect to find herself suddenly in the role of a patient.
About six months into her new job, Michele woke up one morning with severe chills. She had recently had a minor procedure, and as a nurse, she says, “Something in my brain just said, you have to go to the hospital.”
Seriously ill and in septic shock, she was admitted to the ICU for care. “It was a really difficult experience,” she says. Even after her 8-day hospital stay, “I was in bed for a month. It took me awhile to get back to where I was able to work again.”
The Power of a Caring Culture
But along with her unexpected health scare, Michele also discovered something else she didn’t expect: the strength of the culture of caring at Contessa extends to employees as well as patients.
“I have been an RN for 13 years, and this is the first place I have ever worked for that made me feel and know that I was cared about,” she shares. “My team members asked me if they could Uber me groceries when I got out of the hospital, and they were consistently checking in on me to see how I was doing. I kept saying to myself, ‘who calls a coworker to ask if they can Uber them groceries!?’ It’s not something I have ever heard of.”
Michele notes that the caring and concern especially stood out to her because of how new she was to the organization. “It made me emotional to think, ‘I haven’t even worked for this company for very long,’” she says. “’These people are really looking out for me.’ And it’s not like we work bedside, where you have more of a chance to get to know people. So I was very emotional to have this outpouring from people who barely knew me, and for such a short period of time.”
Continued Support for Recovery
When she was able to return to work, Michele emphasizes that the consideration and support continued. Her first morning back, she explains, she discovered that she had a new team leader, who sent her a message asking her to call him. “I called him, and he introduced himself and said, ‘I know you’re just coming back, but I want you to know we’re here for you. Anything you need, or any kind of support — any questions since you’ve been gone for a while, I want to make sure you know that we have your back.’”
She adds, “Even when I met him later, he asked, ‘How is everything? Is everything going OK for you? Do you feel like it’s too much?’ I felt genuine caring.
“I would say that the company saw that quality within him, and that’s the kind of people that Contessa employs.”
Hospital at Home is a “Community Outreach”
Michele is proud to be a part of what she calls “a community outreach.” She describes the many ways in which hospital at home benefits the patients she serves: “I think the program probably saves a lot of AMA (against medical advice) patients —people who don’t want to be in the hospital, don’t want to have a roommate — if they’re eligible, they can go home and still receive the care they need. I think it probably saves a lot of those patients from relapsing into whatever brought them there to begin with.
She continues, “With the crunch that we have for beds in general, it frees up beds for people who are extremely ill. So, it’s all around just a wonderful program.”
Michele concludes, “I consistently keep saying how much I love this job — both the people that I work with and the job itself and the care that I’m able to provide.”