Dentistry Operating Room Schedulers Embody Compassionate Care

Walk past the desks of Bree Crouch, Samantha Heis or Melissa Wulfeck, and you’ll see what looks like controlled chaos. There are post-it notes stuck to multiple surfaces and lots of scribbled calendar reminders, all in service to coordinating care for nearly 3,000 children and making sure they get the dental treatment they need.

But what the Dentistry operating room schedulers do goes way beyond making appointments for procedures like stainless steel crown placements, root canals and wisdom teeth extractions. They are bringing the human touch to a process that could so easily make people feel like they’re only a number.

For their efforts, the three were recently honored with the Dr. Curtis Sheldon Compassionate Caregiver Award.

The Challenge The scheduling team has no easy task. For starters, there are a finite number of OR slots Monday through Friday, between 9 am and 3:30 pm, with three to four providers at four different locations. That leaves room to schedule roughly 10-15 patients per day. The team manages a sizable wait list of patients, some of whom are ours and some who are referred by community physicians. Through their concentrated efforts, they have whittled down the wait time for an appointment from over 10 months to 4 weeks.

“When you have a typically healthy child with a straightforward need, we coordinate with Anesthesia to line up an available slot,” says Crouch. “But when you have medically complex patients with various degrees of chronic or emergent issues, that’s when it gets interesting.”

Take, for instance, the patient who needs dental surgery AND a lung transplant. But the dental surgery has to happen before the patient can be actively placed on the transplant list. Or the child in need of cardiac surgery who must have dental work done ahead of time to reduce their risk of infection.

Then there’s the patient who needs a dental procedure in addition to several others involving different specialties—and it all has to be done before they return to their country at the end of the month.

Still another patient is becoming increasingly aggressive due to dental pain.

“We work behind the scenes with our providers to figure out who can come out of clinic or give up their administrative time to add one more to the schedule,” says Crouch. “We recently had several cases where we coordinated with five or more different services to schedule one surgery. We’re constantly on the phone or sending emails back and forth, working closely with surgery schedulers from other departments. Of course, when you make it work for one patient, you’re taking a spot from another patient. It’s like this big Tetris game. Aside from helping the families, what I love most is figuring out where all the pieces fit so we can serve our patients in a timely manner.”

Crouch, Heis and Wulfeck get to know the families they work with—so much that when they see a patient’s name come up, they’re often already familiar with their backstory and what they need.

Explains Heis, “If there’s a cancellation, certain patients come to mind. You know they’re in a tough situation, and this could be an opportunity to help them. We had a child in foster care who needed treatment. The foster mother called and said she only had him for a limited time, and she wanted to get him in before he was put back into the system where follow-up was not guaranteed. So we moved things around and got him scheduled.”

Beyond Scheduling Crouch, Heis and Wulfeck are experts at massaging the Dental OR schedule, but they do so much more.

When a family comes to the clinic without insurance, they provide the financial aid paperwork. Then they assist with tracking it to its completion, if necessary. This is particularly important with families who don’t speak English.

“We don’t schedule procedures until the financial aid has been approved, because families don’t fully understand the cost,” says Crouch. “We don’t want them to get this huge bill and then be stressed about how they’re going to pay it. That just leads to other complications and barriers.”

They also help get insurance authorizations and signed consent forms from parents, legal guardians, or the patients themselves if they’re 18 or older.

Says Wulfeck, “It’s not just a matter of getting a signature but of making sure the consent form is in the appropriate language so there’s a true understanding of what they’re consenting to.”

And like everything else, COVID has made it more difficult.

Heis tells the story of a little girl whose foster parents had been trying to get consent for a procedure from the county for well over 6 months.

“There had been so many staffing changes and shortages at county offices, they weren’t getting anywhere,” she explains. “We called different numbers and left messages, trying to get someone to call us back, because we can’t schedule anything until we get consent. Finally, we were successful and could get her taken care of. The foster father was very appreciative because she’d been in pain for so long.”

As parents themselves, all three members of the Dental OR Scheduling Team have empathy for the families as they try to gain access to services.

Says Heis, “It’s frustrating if you don’t hear anything for a few days while we’re working with other services to coordinate schedules or get approvals, so we call the parents to touch base and let them know where we are in the process. We want to reassure them and not leave them wondering what’s going on.”

Adds Crouch, “I have been doing this for 7 years, and I have never heard anyone—from clinical managers to admin staff to our providers—say, ‘That’s not my job. I’m not going to help you.’ Everyone in this office pitches in to do whatever needs to be done so the patients and families get the best possible outcome. It can be as simple as listening. Just the littlest kindness can change someone’s mood and help them feel like they’ve been heard.”