Director of Home Health and Hospice, Home Care Network

>> My name is Sharon Johnson and I'm a nurse by background and here at The Homecare Network, I'm director of home health and hospice. The Homecare Network is a provider of in-home services. We have home health. We have hospice. We have home infusion and we have private duty services. The home health services and the hospice services are nursing, occasionally therapies involved with the cases, and home health aides and social workers. I'm very often here in the office and/or at one of our facility hospitals, at meetings usually mostly of a patient care related nature or sometimes patient safety and quality meetings. Here in the office, right now I'm into the evaluation process and we're all completing evaluations on our managers and our educators and they in turn are working with our nurses and our therapists. So that's, you know, that's today's date. I chair several committees, so I'm frequently, you know, overseeing a meeting in the area of clinical management and quality and our professional advisory committee is one I chair. I'm basically the person that oversees and makes sure that our care meets standards of care and also meets regulatory requirements with the Department of Health with the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. We are a Medicare agency and so we go through the normal survey process and I'm the one that oversees that we're doing everything the right way we should be, that policies are developed, and they're, you know, they're according to standards of care. The other piece is that I have responsibility for overseeing the standard, the practice of nursing to make sure that my nurses are practicing to the fullest extent of their license but also not overstepping that and that includes professional development and we offer educational courses here. We do in servicing. Sometimes I'm the one doing the in service. Sometimes I delegate that to someone else.