Healthcare Hero: Susan Wilner, LCSW, Assistant Director, Behavioral Health Services Operations
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Title
Healthcare Hero: Susan Wilner, LCSW, Assistant Director, Behavioral Health Services Operations
Description
I oversee operations for behavioral health at Stony Brook, Eastern LI, and Southampton Hospital, as well as our ambulatory sites. I help to operationalize new initiatives and maintain regulatory compliance, as well as come up with new ways to deliver services and improve access throughout the system. And when COVID hit, that meant telemedicine. It’s actually something I’d been working on for a while, but it went into warp speed with the pandemic. Telemedicine has always been important in order to help improve access to healthcare. COVID really highlighted the inequities in healthcare, but telemedicine is helping us to bridge some of those gaps. Part of our telemedicine efforts included giving tablets to our COVID units so providers could do virtual consults with patients who were positive for the Coronavirus. iPads were also given to patients so they could talk to their families outside of the hospital. We have also worked collaboratively between our hospitals to help bring services to where the patients are, but the services may not be. Most recently we began doing psychiatric evaluations on patients at Southampton Hospital from our providers at Stony Brook University Hospital in an effort to save the patients from having to take an ambulance trip from out East all the way to Stony Brook. This is helped us to provide even better care and a better patient experience to all of our patients, regardless of where they are located. I still continue to do this work, but I now also spend a lot of time leading vaccine PODs here. This is the first time in a year that I’ve felt like I’m part of the solution. Up until this point, I’ve felt like I have been helping others to work, live and just simply function in a pandemic. But now, I feel like I’m helping us to get to the other side of this. It finally feels good.
Subject
Extent
1 file
Language
en
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Type
Format
Identifier
cap-hch-SusanWilner
Date Submitted
2021-06-13
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Attached media
cap-hch-SusanWilner.jpg
