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HR and Communications Recognition Week: A Day in the Life of Sarah Fernandes

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Working well with people is a skill that often can’t be taught – you either have it or you don’t. For a Human Resources Generalist, that ability is an important part of the job.

Sarah Fernandes, a Human Resource Generalist at TransForm, uses that skill daily at the offices in Windsor and Chatham to recruit new staff, assist existing staff with benefits, vacation and pension questions and many other tasks that vary day-to-day.

With 10 years at TransForm under her belt, Fernandes just returned to her HR role recently after a secondment to the Chatham Kent Health Alliance Medical Affairs department, where she helped train doctors on the new Cerner HIS system through e-VOLVE and assisted with recruiting new doctors.

Chatting with Fernandes as she went about her day at the Chatham office, she shared her beginnings at TransForm. Starting out as a volunteer to gain experience, Fernandes was hired on to work in HR and payroll, moving fully into HR after a year or so.  

“I’ve been busy doing HR tasks for the past 10 years. As an HR generalist, I do what is assigned to me, usually recruiting and benefits related tasks,” she noted.

Assigned to help with hiring during the e-VOLVE project, she was given the challenge to find clinical staff who liked computers and had project management experience and then the pandemic happened. Trainers were hard to come by during that period so, Fernandes was asked to train in-patient nursing staff during the e-VOLVE go-lives, a task she really enjoyed.

Back at TransForm for the past couple of months Fernandes noticed big changes and lots of new faces. She is now preparing for the second wave of the e-VOLVE project, adding Bluewater Health to the Cerner HIS.

 “I’ll help out wherever I can. That’s what HR does, we’re here to help out the managers and the staff to get the resources they need to do their job,” she noted. “Being flexible is a big part of the generalist job.”

For example, Fernandes could be found assisting with the Richmond Street office move to optimize desk space for our Chatham location.

“There’s a little joke I’ve heard about the line on your job description that says, “Duties as assigned” and we get a lot of duties as assigned but it helps with the variety of work we do, making every day different and interesting,” Fernandes added.

As she was talking her phone chimed with a call to assist in vetting a candidate’s resume and ensuring the information it contained was factual and relevant, another one of the tasks she had lined up for the day.

Talking with Fernandes, her HR instinct as a people person kicked in and soon, she was asking the questions and putting the candidate at ease with her relaxed and easy manner.

With her experience, she said people interested in this type of job would have to know what type of work they enjoy.

“If they enjoy variety and different tasks, creating a solution and making something work, then going into a generalist kind of role, there is always a variety of different things you are getting pulled into and having to sharpen those skills sets for whatever is needed for you to do,” she explained. “You can also go into HR and specialize in something and have more of that routine and becoming a subject matter expert. There are a lot of different directions you can go into with an HR background.”

Each day for Fernandes provides the variety she likes, and as she switched gears from moving desks to vetting resumes, the smile never left her face.

HR and Communications Recognition Week: Leadership Message from Michelle Watters

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June 12-16 is TransForm SSO’s Human Resources and Communications recognition week.  As part of celebrating these two collaborative departments and to mark this special week at TransForm SSO, we’re sharing a message from Michelle Watters, Director, Stakeholder Relations, Performance and People.

A Special Message from Michelle:

This past year, while challenging, has been one of remarkable successes thanks to you – the incredible HR and communications teams we have here at TransForm. With our focus on engagement and people, you have worked hard to carry out your tasks above and beyond what is expected, and I’d like to take the time to thank each and every one of you for not just getting us through the year, but for achieving our goals even when it hasn’t always been easy.

Our Human Resources team has been able to find creative ways to keep our recruitment cycle going in spite of challenges with outside competition. It’s a job seekers market right now and as a strategic partner you have been so adaptable and willing to do whatever it takes to support operations across all departments.

From onboarding new staff and keeping the recruitment cycle going, helping with the Social and Joint Health and Safety committees, you have jumped in with both feet and a can-do attitude to help build the culture TransForm needs to position itself for growth and to be regarded as an employer of choice.

We have a small team but you’ve been able to achieve a lot and still keep the lights on. With the work you did during the pandemic when establishing our workplace COVID protocols, you were successful in ensuring we did not have one single workplace outbreak.  This caught the attention of the Ministry of Labour where inspectors actually brought new staff on their inspection team to TransForm as an example of how things should be done. What an accomplishment!

In Communications, again we have a small, new team but your attention to detail and adaptability have helped build TransForm’s brand, by supporting other departments with marketing materials, keeping our people informed with newsletter updates and generating great ideas for our soon to be launched website re-design.  Not to mention the successful award submissions you silently authored to recognize TransForm’s amazing accomplishments on both provincial and national levels – you always make sure TransForm is in the spotlight and your work is paying off with the awards, recognition and increased followers on social media.

To all of you, my sincerest thanks for your dedication to support others so they can be successful.  You are often the unsung heroes, but please know that you play an integral part in making TransForm who it is today and will be in the future.

Wendy Wilson: Recognized as Community Care Leader of the Year 2023 by Digital Health Canada

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TransForm SSO’s regional digital health project manager, Wendy Wilson, has been awarded Digital Health Canada’s Community Care Leader of the Year 2023, which recognizes community care leaders who have shown outstanding leadership in Canada, advancing the use of digital health or virtual health, resulting in improved provider and patient experiences and outcomes. This recognition highlights Wilson’s 25 years of experience and her pivotal role in spearheading the Ontario eHub project within the province.

Ontario eHub is a health information exchange program that facilitates the connection and exchange of health information electronically with 63 Cerner hospitals in Ontario and external health systems that connect to the hub, with four concurrent work streams.

Ontario eHub is part of Project Amplifi, which started with connecting all Long-Term Health Care Homes (LTCH) in the province that utilize the PointClickCare Electronic Medical Record (EMR) to acute care Health Information Systems (HIS) like Oracle Health. One patient, one integrated record across the continuum of care allows a seamless communication exchange when transferring patients between acute and long-term care and a more efficient process for frontline staff.

Congratulations to Wilson on this well-deserved award, and we eagerly anticipate her future ‘TransFormative’ impacts on digital health within the region and Ontario.

IT Recognition Week: A Special Feature of the IT Infrastructure Department

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A Glimpse into the IT Infrastructure Department

The IT Infrastructure department has always been labelled as the framework to everything. With our network serving as a highway that connects data to servers while this data comes from various operating systems and is sent to our regional data centre, our talented team is equipped to handle all the different operating systems and technology needed for application and unstructured data.

A typical day in the IT Infrastructure department starts and ends in Cherwell – TransForm SSO’s ticketing application to track and monitor IT service requests and incidents. Team members actively review these tickets to perform operational checks of the environment. If any problems are detected, the team records it in Cherwell and work together towards the resolution phase. Another key part of the day involves working on tickets in the Cherwell queue and addressing pending project tasks. Of course, nothing is absolutely set in stone since priorities and tickets greatly dictate a lot of these projects, so the team often revisits the operational work plan to make additions or modifications. However, having a set plan in place greatly helps the team track their updates and patches in the systems. A lot of time the team may have to collaborate with different departments to plan scheduled maintenance events to ensure that the systems continue running efficiently and smoothly.

Reflecting on the past ten years, this team has come a long way. In fact, Jeff Dugan, the team’s leader, highlighted one of his proudest moments is how far from this team has come and particularly the cohesion within his department. This department functions as a true team that not only interacts with one another but knows each other personally, which makes the members function better when collaborating as well as when working independently. This is greatly mirrored in the team’s ability to continuously maintain a more updated maintenance schedule and foster a very stable environment where each member can truly contribute to TransForm SSO and thrive. 

IT Recognition Week: A Day in the Life of Kyle Pfeifer

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As we celebrate Information Technology week at TransForm SSO on May 15-19, we are featuring a Day in the Life of a TransForm SSO employee working at one of our member hospitals.

As an organization, TransForm SSO has a mandate and mission to provide exceptional customer service to our member hospitals, and part of that includes having staff on-site to problem troubleshoot IT issues and find solutions quickly so clinical teams and support staff can do their job.

One of those people is IT Support Analyst Kyle Pfeifer, who works at the Chatham Kent Health Alliance (CKHA) in the IT department and assists in keeping equipment up and running smoothly. He has been part of the TransForm SSO team for close to eight years.

IT support analysts work daily during the week and also share 24- hour on-call shifts to deal with any overnight or weekend issues that may arise.

Here is what a #DayInTheLife is like for Kyle Pfeifer

On any given day, Pfeifer and his fellow team members will be tasked with a variety of jobs that are in the background, but have a big impact on day-to-day business, such as requests to deploy new computers/desk phones to departments, troubleshooting issues with Citrix, providing access to various files and folders on network drives and working on projects such as Evergreen, which involves gradually replacing older computers with newer models.

“I work on anywhere from 10-15 items a day, depending on how long each request takes,” Pfeifer noted. “I get tickets and tasks – tasks being user builds and terminations/transfers and tickets being regular day-to-day troubleshooting or deployment of equipment.”

What he can’t plan for are the urgent high priority calls he has to address immediately because it affects a clinical team member’s ability to do their job, such as triaging and fixing problems with the portable Workstation on Wheels (WOW) units nurses use to access patient health records and update vital statistics.

 Assessing the day’s tickets and prioritizing the order in which he deals with them helps him keep on track and can be challenging on days where high priority tickets require him to shift his focus, but he said it makes every day different and he enjoys working with others on the team.

“There is never a set schedule every day. It can be anything from setting up staff being onboarded with a new computer, mouse, and printer, to troubleshooting computer issues, to working on bigger projects like deploying all the new WIFI access points in the ceiling and replacing the old phone system,” Pfeifer said. “It’s never the same.”

He noted that when patient care is affected, it’s never a small thing.

“Even the smallest thing like a nurse’s keyboard doesn’t work; you may think it’s small but if they can’t enter information into medical records, it creates a huge issue and items like that can affect patient care,” he said.

The IT support analyst team works together to address all the issues, with more complex items sent up the chain to the senior analyst to address, such as WIFI dead zones.

Every day, the IT team works on fixing problems that may seem small in isolation but have a huge effect on the overall efficiency and effectiveness of staff. While challenging, Pfeifer said he enjoys his job being a cog in larger wheel that supports patient care and outcomes.

“I like the satisfaction of helping people. That’s why I like IT – everyone’s really grateful when you solve their problem,” Pfeifer explained. “It’s also rewarding to learn new things about different technology, which is constantly changing, and knowing that every day is going to be different.”

The best advice Pfeifer said he would pass on to someone interested in his job is to be patient.

“You’re not going to learn everything all in one week, or even a month. Even though I knew about IT, it took me a couple of years to learn the ins and outs of CKHA and how they work, and all the different stuff TransForm SSO uses, so don’t get down on yourself if you don’t learn everything right away,” Pfeifer noted. “Almost 8 years later, I’m still learning things all the time and we constantly get new things to be trained on. It’s a continual learning experience.”

IT Recognition Week: A Day in the Life of Kyle Pfeifer

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As we celebrate Information Technology week at TransForm SSO on May 15-19, we are featuring a Day in the Life of a TransForm SSO employee working at one of our member hospitals.

As an organization, TransForm SSO has a mandate and mission to provide exceptional customer service to our member hospitals, and part of that includes having staff on-site to problem troubleshoot IT issues and find solutions quickly so clinical teams and support staff can do their job.

One of those people is IT Support Analyst Kyle Pfeifer, who works at the Chatham Kent Health Alliance (CKHA) in the IT department and assists in keeping equipment up and running smoothly. He has been part of the TransForm SSO team for close to eight years.

IT support analysts work daily during the week and also share 24- hour on-call shifts to deal with any overnight or weekend issues that may arise.

Here is what a #DayInTheLife is like for Kyle Pfeifer

On any given day, Pfeifer and his fellow team members will be tasked with a variety of jobs that are in the background, but have a big impact on day-to-day business, such as requests to deploy new computers/desk phones to departments, troubleshooting issues with Citrix, providing access to various files and folders on network drives and working on projects such as Evergreen, which involves gradually replacing older computers with newer models.

“I work on anywhere from 10-15 items a day, depending on how long each request takes,” Pfeifer noted. “I get tickets and tasks – tasks being user builds and terminations/transfers and tickets being regular day-to-day troubleshooting or deployment of equipment.”

What he can’t plan for are the urgent high priority calls he has to address immediately because it affects a clinical team member’s ability to do their job, such as triaging and fixing problems with the portable Workstation on Wheels (WOW) units nurses use to access patient health records and update vital statistics.

 Assessing the day’s tickets and prioritizing the order in which he deals with them helps him keep on track and can be challenging on days where high priority tickets require him to shift his focus, but he said it makes every day different and he enjoys working with others on the team.

“There is never a set schedule every day. It can be anything from setting up staff being onboarded with a new computer, mouse, and printer, to troubleshooting computer issues, to working on bigger projects like deploying all the new WIFI access points in the ceiling and replacing the old phone system,” Pfeifer said. “It’s never the same.”

He noted that when patient care is affected, it’s never a small thing.

“Even the smallest thing like a nurse’s keyboard doesn’t work; you may think it’s small but if they can’t enter information into medical records, it creates a huge issue and items like that can affect patient care,” he said.

The IT support analyst team works together to address all the issues, with more complex items sent up the chain to the senior analyst to address, such as WIFI dead zones.

Every day, the IT team works on fixing problems that may seem small in isolation but have a huge effect on the overall efficiency and effectiveness of staff. While challenging, Pfeifer said he enjoys his job being a cog in larger wheel that supports patient care and outcomes.

“I like the satisfaction of helping people. That’s why I like IT – everyone’s really grateful when you solve their problem,” Pfeifer explained. “It’s also rewarding to learn new things about different technology, which is constantly changing, and knowing that every day is going to be different.”

The best advice Pfeifer said he would pass on to someone interested in his job is to be patient.

“You’re not going to learn everything all in one week, or even a month. Even though I knew about IT, it took me a couple of years to learn the ins and outs of CKHA and how they work, and all the different stuff TransForm SSO uses, so don’t get down on yourself if you don’t learn everything right away,” Pfeifer noted. “Almost 8 years later, I’m still learning things all the time and we constantly get new things to be trained on. It’s a continual learning experience.”