My last post

For this last post I will try and explain my solutions for the problems that I mentioned earlier. They will not be easy to explain but I will try.

My largest problem with my location was all the hoops that they made me jump through before they would allow me to volunteer. If I was not in this class and did not need a location, I would have never even thought of doing a single one of their necessary steps to volunteer. These steps would cause a regular volunteer to leave the location and not volunteer. We volunteer are doing them a service not the other way around. We are giving our time and energy as to help the location and they need to remember that. They need to make the steps for volunteering there easy so that the average volunteer would not get turned away from the location.

My second problem is how the volunteers are treated. The hospital does not see us as very important so they do almost nothing to keep the volunteers at the location. The uniform is far stricter than it needs to be. The way I was treated at the hospital was so poor that I do not think I would return. Maybe it was due to a bad partner. The woman in charge was very helpful and nice. The other woman I had to deal with was cruel and could not understand that I had more going on in my life then remembering how much a statue was. Remembering prices for things was not in the job description. The hospital needs to treat the volunteers the same way they treat the employees if they want to keep them there.

So this ends my blog. It was too bad that my experiences at the hospital were so poor. I had hoped it to be so much better than it was. 

The Rant: Part 2

            This is the continuation of my rant from my last post on the issues of the hospital. This post will be about the problems that I have with attitude that the hospital seems to use on its volunteers. For Arnet it is a bad one. They treat the volunteers like servants. All of the menial task are given to the volunteers. I know this because I have seen it myself and I have heard from a few other volunteers there that this is true.

            I understand that the more flashy jobs are not possible for a volunteer to do. I know that you cannot volunteer to work in the ER with no prior knowledge of how one would work. The volunteers do not have the skills for most of these jobs. However that does not mean that they have trouble with more difficult tasks. The volunteers I talked to all have small jobs where they do the same task again and again. The task does not seem to have any value on the whole of the hospital. When a volunteer feels like this, they do not wish to volunteer any longer at the hospital.

            I know that I do not wish to ever volunteer again at the hospital. It does not seem like what the volunteer coordinator was telling the truth when she said that the volunteers were needed at the Gift Shop. They seem to work fine without me. My only use is to cover for the employee while she goes on “break”. When I say break I mean that the two and a half hour of sitting around doing nothing, while I have to deal with all the problems in the Gift Shop. However a lot of the time I just sit at the desk doing nothing. The first day’s rush was not what commonly happens at the Gift Shop. It is dull work and it does not feel like I am helping at all. This is why I would never volunteer at the hospital again.

            In my next post I will try and show what I think would solve these problems.

My Rant: Part One

Seeing to as I do not have much to say for the rest of my experiences at the hospital, I think I will use this post as a way to speak about my issues with the hospital volunteering system.  This is what my group’s internal research report is about but I have my own views on the issues. So that is what I will write about for this post.

The biggest problem I have is the hour system that is in place. For Arnet, I am required to serve for 33 hours. They force the volunteers to stick to their schedule and refuse to allow for any changes in the schedule. I tried to switch my time for one day and they did not like it. It was not like I was taking another volunteer’s spot. I knew the spot was open and I knew that the Gift shop was fine without me for that time. I had asked earlier and they had been fine with it. Then suddenly they were not. I asked in the same way both times and they still were angry with me for it.

The hour system is fine if there is some way to keep track. They still do not have a sign in sheet for me. So my only record of my hours as of right now is the one for this class. I plan to give them a copy of it as to prove I had worked my hours. I do not want to know what would happen if they thought I did not do my entire time.

Yes I know it seems like I am ranting about this, but it is an important thing if you want to keep the volunteers. Next post I will continue my rant on the issues with hospital volunteering.

My training

            After the initial rush, I finally got the help I needed to understand what I was to do at the hospital gift shop. It was not as easy as I had hoped sadly. Not only was I supposed to help the customers (which I am fine with doing), I also needed to learn how to make all the things that the gift shop supplied. So for this post I will write about the period of time that it took me to learn all these things. Oddly I learned something about the hospital itself from this less than pleasant time.

            I am not the best with arts and crafts. I have never been and I doubt I ever will. However the volunteer coordinator “forgot” to mention all the tasks I had to do while I was here. If I had known I think I still would have volunteered there, but it would have been nice to know what I was getting myself into.

            My true training started with learning how to make the balloons. Of all the service out there, I get the location that involves balloons and service at the same time. I do not know if that is such a bad thing though. I learned that a lot of the objects being sold had to be hand made in the shop. I do not mean the more complex things, but the simple things like the balloons or the flower arrangements. So they rely on the volunteers to make them.

            The next thing I had to learn was how to make the flowers look presentable. Even though I was sneezing the entire time because of my allergies, I still had to learn how to do it.

            The reason they rely on the volunteers is because there is only one other person at the gift shop if the volunteer is not there. So it is very important that I go every week.

            The next few posts, I admit, will be slightly boring. The pattern I just described is pretty much all that happens at the hospital gift shop.

The Gift Shop

           My first day working as a volunteer for the hospital started with a lot of work. I knew that I might have to do a lot of work for this location, but I had never expected there to be as much as I had to do that first day.

            It all started when I got to the front of the Gift Shop. The shop is right below the main entrance to the hospital. It is tucked away in a corner and is very easy to miss unless you know where you are going. I ,of course, missed the door when I first went. Whereas the guest area is light and open, the gift shop is dark and a little dreary. It lies on a side of the hospital that never seems to get any of the sunlight, so it goes against the free feelings one would get from the rest of the area.

It is has all the things one would expect in a hospital gift shop. It has food, flowers (not fun with my allergies but I survive), balloons, and other gifts. However, all this stuff is in an area no bigger than our room for this class. So it is very cramped and hard to navigate without the risk of hitting something.

That first day I did not even get a moments rest. There was a massive convention or at the hospital that day and they all wanted something from the Gift Shop. So instead of learning what I had to do while there, I spent the entire time rushing around trying to get everything the crowd wanted. I think that was more helpful than a learning day for me.

The First Day: last part

            This is the last part of my first day that I will talk about in this blog. I have used so many of the post describing that because the rest of my volunteering is not as interesting as that first week.

            As I said I would in my other posts now I need to describe the long process involved with the final part of what I needed to do to volunteer. It all started with my immunization records. The records they required were far more detailed than what I had even needed for Purdue. It required immunizations to diseases that I did not think would be even close to a problem with the Gift Shop. I do not think that the chances of a whooping cough outbreak at the gift shop would even be possible. However I know that they wanted to make sure that it never could be. So they sent me to the outpatient facility. If you guessed that this entailed me having to go way out of my way to get there, you guessed right. The facility was only a mile away from the nearest bus stop and at least it wasn’t snowing.

            They needed to get three different things for me at the location. I needed to take a drug test, get a tuberculosis test, and get a flu shot. The drug test went without a problem. The other two were not so great. I have had a minor fear of needles since I was about 10 years old (an allergy test that involved 54 shots in one siting caused it). It is not to the point where I would faint or anything at the sight of a needle but I am not a big fan of injections. So getting two in the same arm was not something I was looking forward to. The tb test was supposed to be a small prick on my arm, but the nurse did it wrong and it became a massive welt instead. This was not a sign of tb thankfully. The flu shot was even worse. I had caught a cold from my trek to the hospital the week before and the shot only made it worse. I never seem to have good luck with this type of thing it seems. Next post will describe the Gift Shop and my first time there.