OUR VALUES

Jeff Beeson, DO, Clinical Medicine; Jacob Huston and Zach Sumner, TCOM Students

Running the medical tent at the annual Cowtown races is no small job. This is where runners get help for dehydration, injuries and potentially life-threatening conditions.

This year, Jeff Beeson, DO, and TCOM students Jacob Huston and Zach Sumner shouldered this volunteer assignment, giving up multiple mornings and afternoons for planning meetings as well as an entire weekend to oversee the work in the medical tent. This wasn’t part of their job description or class schedule; it was a volunteer opportunity, and they went above and beyond to serve others first.

They worked together to coordinate more than 230 volunteers’ schedules, handle requests from the Cowtown staff, run background checks, conduct training and accomplish several more tasks.

The student leaders and Beeson showed a high level of collaboration in ensuring that students from all UNTHSC programs who wanted to help were given the opportunity.

Sumner and Huston stepped up to run triage and find solutions to challenges that arose during the event. They arrived early and stayed late to set up and break down the tent. All three members of this team truly went above and beyond the call of duty.

Nominator: Jennifer Nanni

Lauren Goodpaster, TCOM Advising and Career Development

Career Development Coordinator Lauren Goodpaster lives the Value of being visionary. She developed a new curriculum to provide residency advising for first- and second-year students, helping them become more competitive for their chosen specialties.

Because of Goodpaster’s work, students can get early advice on vital matters such as the amount of research and/or community service needed for their chosen specialty.

She also revamped the Careers in Medicine initiative. In addition, she collaborated with Career Services and the Care Team, and lent her creative talents to Faculty Development Center events.

She developed a leadership curriculum for the Advisory College Intercollegiate Council and meets with members monthly to implement it. Says her nominator, “She often sacrifices her time to be available for whoever needs her.”

Goodpaster “helps students identify specific strategies for their success,” says her nominator. She asks them to identify the ways that various specialties align with their own core values. Goodpaster encourages students “to evaluate their ‘why’ and how they can stay true to that during the selection process,” says her nominator.

Nominator: Ryan Ziller

Adenike Atanda, PharmD and Brittany Palasik, PharmD, Pharmacotherapy

Pharmacy post-graduate residency and fellowships are increasingly sought-after. To assist students applying to these highly competitive programs, the System College of Pharmacy implemented a number of unrelated steps over the past two years.

Now, through the work of Adenike Atanda and Brittany Palasik, an organized, concerted effort ensures that every interested student has uniform prep materials and a mentoring system.

They solicited faculty mentors, paired students with mentors based on interests, distributed timelines and checklists for success, and created and sent out informational and preparation materials to students.

Although many SCP team members were involved in this collaborative success, Atanda and Palasik were “the driving force behind this organized innovation,” says their nominator.

Atanda and Palasik were not charged with this task, but volunteered. “Their one goal was student success and linking everyone together to ensure that our students have maximum support,” says their nominator. Details are part of the program. Checkpoints and targeted emails are sent at intervals to make sure everyone stays on target for tasks such as applications and interview prep.

Additionally, the program may have potential as a best practice for other schools looking to implement mentoring programs for post-graduate education.

Nominator: Meredith Howard

Matt Rowland, Bob Short, Jack Thetford and Seth Willmoth (Facilities Management); Jeff Mott, PA-C; Lt. Tim Payovich (Police Department); and Joshua Pavlik (TCOM Student)

This team led our establishment of a campus-wide Stop the Bleed Program designed to aid individuals with uncontrolled bleeding. Medical supplies are now staged in wall-mounted boxes all over campus, to be used in the event of an incident such as an active shooter. More than 300 faculty, students, staff, and law enforcement officers have been trained in what is called tactical pre-hospital medical care, so they can stop victims’ bleeding until ambulances arrive.

The program provides tourniquets for police officers and select students, medical equipment bags for all campus police vehicles, and 20 Life Station® medical kits prepositioned in high-traffic areas of the campus.

Says the team’s nominator, “UNTHSC would not have this program without this team’s collaboration and pursuit of this goal as One University.”

Jeff Mott in Physician Assistant Studies, and Joshua Pavlik, a military veteran and TCOM student, train faculty, students, and staff in bleed control, and will continue to develop more instructors so UNTHSC can increase the number of trained team members. Lt. Timothy Payovich started the collaboration with Mott to provide training to all UNTHSC PD Officers.

Facilities Management was crucial to the effort. Seth Willmoth, Matt Rowland, Bob Short, and Jack Thetford ensured compliant installation of the kits. Willmoth and Rowland worked with the vendor to make sure the cabinet designer provided an ADA compliant product. Jack Thetford installed each one, in eight buildings across campus.

The training is now part of the PA Studies curriculum. As soon as the team develops more instructors, UNTHSC will offer quarterly training to the campus community.

Team members volunteered their own time for many of the tasks, such as building training aids in home garages.

Says the nominator, “Thank you for your integrity …. Thank you for the collaboration that made this program a reality.”

Nominator: Brandi Lara

Cecilia Rivera, Career Center, Division of Student Affairs

Cecilia Rivera, Administrative Support Specialist, takes on big projects and makes them highly successful. One of those projects is the Professional Attire Resource Closet, which provides students with new and gently used clothing for interviews and other professional dress-up occasions.

Says her nominator, “Cecilia has single-handedly pulled together a catalog of all the donated clothes so that students can view them online before coming to the Career Center to try them on. She has spent hours taking photos of the clothing and looking up size and manufacturer information to make the catalog complete.”

Rivera researched the internet for better ways to measure the clothing, and “has gone above and beyond to make the catalog user-friendly,” her nominator says.

She also puts her graphic design skills to use, creating a flyer to guide potential clothing donors, as well as a new calendar and poster for Career Readiness Month (April 2019).

“She takes her responsibilities as an Administrative Support Specialist to a new level, always asking the team members how she can help,” says her nominator. “She goes out of her way to assist students with their appointment needs and is quick to follow up on any questions or requests that she receives.”

Nominator: Nancy Eanes