by Bailey White
Staff Writer
“St. Vincent’s Medical Center, this is Operator Wanda.”
That’s what callers can expect to hear when the hospital phone is answered — a real human voice after just a few short rings.
At a time when other organizations, most nowhere near as large as St. Vincent’s 3,000 employees, send all of their calls to an automated answering service, Catherine Law, chief operator for St. Vincent’s, is striving to maintain a personal touch when connecting outside callers to doctors and patients or staff to other staff.
“I always say we’re the heartbeat of the hospital,” said Law. “Everything filters through our hands every day.”
But it’s not enough for Law and her staff to just answer the phone. She wants them to do their job with as much compassion as possible
“Many people calling here are in some kind of pain, whether it’s physical or mental,” she said. “ And it’s important that we remember that.”
Distraught family members of patients often flood the phone lines and the operators occasionally receive suicide threats from desperate individuals.
Of course not all the calls are heartbreaking — excited grandparents call about their new babies — and Law said some of the off-the-wall questions the operators are asked can be very funny.
“We get calls for everything from pizza to bedpans,” said Law. “We know how to get everything, so everyone calls us.”
“Everyone” includes an employee who ran out of gas on her way to work one morning.
“She wanted to know if we could bring her a gas can,” said Law, who has managed to create a balance between the responsibility and the fun that her team has to deal with on a daily basis by making the environment, no matter how hectic, a pleasant one.
When she moved up from operator to chief, “I changed everything I didn’t like,” she said.
The first was to hire more people to take pressure off an understaffed office.
“A lot of people think that as operators all we do is sit around and file our nails and eat bon bons,” said Law.
But her staff has no time for that — they’re busy fielding 5,000 or more calls each day, and the operators are responsible for notifying the entire hospital of all codes, whether it’s a code blue for cardiac arrest or a code violet for an immediate threat to life.
“Nothing gets by us,” said Law.
Another common misconception is that the people working the hospital’s information desk are the ones whose voices are heard at the other end of the telephone line. But the operators, who fill a room on the third floor of the Dillon building, have nowhere near that amount of visibility.
“We’ll talk to a person on the phone for years and never see their face,” said Law.
Law decided to address that by hosting an open house so that hospital staff could visit the operators in their domain and see exactly how the job gets done.
“Between 500 and 800 people came through,” said Law, who made an ice sculpture of a dolphin for the occasion. “The office looked great, and we didn’t shut anything down so the people in the hospital got to watch our operators in action.”
Law said it was a treat for her and the staff to connect faces to so many of the voices that they hear all the time.
“These are people we talk to all the time,” she said.
Law has also created a new system which allows operators to see the face of the person they’re contacting via phone. The high-tech system is not something Law could have imagined when she took her first-ever job as a telephone operator in her native England.
“It was a switchboard operation,” said Law, who also has experience in child care — she worked as a nanny for President Jimmy Carter’s press photographer. She also spent nine years in the Navy as a dental hygienist.
But it is her number one passion which brought her back to the phone lines.
“I’ve just always loved people,” she said. “I love people and I love customer service.”