Chapter 18: Significant Committee Work
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Description
Ms. Villejo first discusses her work on the Integrated Patient and Referring Provider Experience Team. She explains how MD Anderson began providing many additional materials when the NCI stopped providing their materials due to budget cuts. Many of these are still in use.
She next explains that her work on the Clinical Ethics Committee “opened her eyes” to issues that clinicians face. She describes Clinical Ethics Consults to illustrate.
Identifier
VillejoL_03_20150605_C18
Publication Date
6-5-2015
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Louise Villejo, MPH, MCHES, Oral History Interview, June 05, 2015
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - The Administrator; The Professional at Work; Collaborations; Patients, Treatment, Survivors; Offering Care, Compassion, Help; Patients; Cancer and Disease
Transcript
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I wanted to ask you if there were any other important committees that you’d served on. I mean so far you’ve hit the ones that I found when I was doing background research. Is there anything I’ve missed?
Louise Villejo, MPH, MCHES:
Let’s see. Which have we talked about?
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Let’s see. We talked about the Psychosocial Council, the Patient and Family Advisory Committee, the Minority Faculty and Administration Council. And then you had talked about the Women Faculty Committee. One I have, the Integrated Patient and Referring Provider Experience Team. Is that a different one?
Louise Villejo, MPH, MCHES:
That is—so we probably have, I don’t know, 200 committees around Epic. And so this one is addressing the patient experience and the external provider. And so they’re really just trying to make sure that all of those issues are raised and are addressed. And so that was that one. I think one—I’ve been on a tremendous number of—well, I mean just talking about that pain issue, I mean when they came out with the pain guidelines and huge pain initiative from the National Cancer Institute, I served on that and made sure that we had appropriate—we were developing—we use a lot of the National Cancer Institute resources. But then we often develop our own. And one thing that has happened over the years is that we used to get boxes and boxes of NCI materials that we could distribute to our patients, and that has really stopped, because they’ve cut the budget so much that they don’t print the materials anymore. So what we do is go on ride-ons to go with other groups to purchase materials. So we do develop the patient initiative. So I knew and it had been drilled into me that patient control, pain control was so important. And I was drilling that into my family members. And so that was a huge initiative.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I’m sorry. What was the name of that committee that was related to the pain?
Louise Villejo, MPH, MCHES:
Oh, I think it was called the Pain Initiative. If I remember the exact name. I mean it was many years ago. But I know that that is something that is very important that the institution tries to communicate to patients. We have a lot of educational resources around it.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
So what did that initiative accomplish?
Louise Villejo, MPH, MCHES:
They developed a number of guidelines for the institution and then we developed a number of education materials. So those guidelines are still available on our Web site and order sets and so forth.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Interesting.
Louise Villejo, MPH, MCHES:
Another one that I think really opened my eyes to the bigger institution, as I mentioned we all see different sides of the elephant. And I think in education, yes, we’ve got a little pushback here and there over the years, but overall what’s bad about education? Everybody thinks it’s important, and a lot of people do their practice projects around developing educational resources so they can meet some of their performance standards. And so it’s a good thing. When I was on Clinical Ethics, I think I saw a different part of the elephant. I know I did. And so that was a tremendous learning experience for me, and I really appreciated learning so much about clinical ethics. And at that time this was when they first had started the department. They would train everybody on the committee, and then when somebody called a clinical ethics consult, you went with—it was usually I think a doctor, nurse, and an other. Of course I was one of the others. And so you could see some of the struggles of issues that were brought up. I remember one that I sat in on. And the family members were adamant that they wanted their parent I think it was to be treated more aggressively and continue. And medically it was not appropriate. It was not going to help the patient. The patient also was not adamant about continuing with such strong treatment. And so that was very as you can imagine eye-opening discussion. Just to see how that was handled and what the priorities were for the family members and how they were different.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Did that experience change anything about the way you thought about educational materials or information you should be providing to patients or could be providing?
Louise Villejo, MPH, MCHES:
Well, we’ve always had advance directive resources. But at that time we really started reworking our advance directive resources and processes so of course I worked closely with Social Work and Clinical Ethics and several other departments to really look at—it’s a hard thing to communicate. I mean just the word. Who ever hears that word, or those words, anywhere else? And people think when they hear medical power of attorney they think well, I need to get a lawyer to do this. And so we were really trying to break it down and make it as simple as possible. And get the processes in place where it was introduced to the patient and then we had a little brochure that they could read about the different types of advance directives and what they needed to think about and so forth. So I mean that was the start of really tackling the issue in a more comprehensive. And not to say that we hadn’t already been doing that for years. But that was one of the big projects that I worked on in Clinical Ethics. But just to hear a lot of the issues that I never would have heard, being involved mainly in education.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Right. I can imagine that did give you a whole different window on the institution and the experience of patients.
Louise Villejo, MPH, MCHES:
Mm-hmm.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Are there any other committees? That was a big one? Those were the big ones?
Louise Villejo, MPH, MCHES:
Mm-hmm. There were so many others. (laughter)
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Well, I’m just trying to get a sense of what you feel is the most significant. So yeah. I think I had written—oh yeah. Clinical Ethics Committee. I had written it down but just didn’t see it.
Recommended Citation
Villejo, Louise and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 18: Significant Committee Work" (2015). Interview Chapters. 1533.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1533
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