Maintaining Communication
Thomas: So tell us a little bit about how you maintained your communication
between, if you will, their staff at the Human Services Center and your staff,
because I know it’s kind of a third facet, if you will, of the advanced referral
system. Tell us a little bit about that.
Laura:
Well when you were having their entitlement specialist doing some of
the intake, obviously you need to know, well what if I have a follow-up question,
you know, they’ve only asked a basic question, and especially in the beginning
they really don’t understand why when you’re asking questions to get towards: is
there a subsidy or something like that, somebody, you know, wouldn’t really
understand why am I asking that and…
Thomas: yup
Laura:
you know might not know to ask those important follow-up questions
and so we just tried to make the form something where it would hit the highlights
and when you see something we could contact that entitlement specialist to
reach the customer and get more information or contact the customer directly if
they did have a phone or a stable address which usually they didn’t, and she was
able to get that information for us.
Well I think that’s so important because I know for myself I it makes me nervous
to empower people with this knowledge, and just sort of blindly let them go. I
think it makes us all, it would make us concerned, what’s going on, how’s it
going, and if you don’t remind people that they’re supposed to be doing this new
partnership, you know, maybe they wouldn’t. So we really felt we had to build in
a piece where there was ongoing communication. So we built in at least monthly
phone calls where we got the whole group together, the job coaches, the
entitlement specialists, the trainer, and the BPA&O’s and the benefits specialists
involved, and it was really important for us to do that because we really did find,
you know sometimes they would forget something or…
Thomas: sure
Laura: you know there would be a problem that we hadn’t anticipated and then
we could tweak the system as we needed to. It was real fluid so we were able to
really make changes when it was necessary.