MARCH 23, 2006
VCU
WEBCAST
Captioning Provided By:  Caption First, Inc.

				
    >>  Good morning.  I'm Erin Riehle.  I'm delighted to be with 
you here today.  My topic is adding value to the business. 
    Basically, what I will be talking about is a model for 
including people with disabilities in the workplace, I'll be 
discussing our project search model, some of our common 
principles, benefits to business and case studies to illustrate 
those benefits. 
    
    I want to start out by looking at our model.  As a 
businesswoman, we started project search ten years ago, and what 
I recognized is that I knew nothing about disability. 
    
    As I was introduced, what would happen is that it turned out 
there were 15 to 20 agencies and schools in our community and 
they were all working with people with disabilities.  What they 
would do, they would come to our hospital and often to our HR 
department and would ask if we would hire people with 
disabilities.  As a businessperson I didn't know who they were, 
or how they were different from one another.  I particularly 
didn't know that at each agency, they had what I would refer to 
as a fleet of job developers and that each job developer had a 
caseload of consumers. 
    
    This was confusing to business.  Often what would happen is a 
job developer would come into the hospital, and that morning 
they might have been at a fast food chain and they might have 
been at another business before coming to us, and they would 
walk into the HR office, and they would ask for a job.  Often 
without knowing what jobs we had available or whether their 
person was even interested. 
    
    It was typically done in a cold call.  What we did when we 
work with businesses and work with people in the rehab industry 
is to stress that this is not at all a business model.  It is 
not a model that makes sense to us or that is intuitive to us.  
For example, when we purchase food for our cafeteria, we don't 
work with every vendor in town who sells food.  We develop a 
relationship with one vendor and work with that person or that 
company. 
    
    When we buy supplies for our operating room, we don't work 
with every vendor in the country.  We work with one vendor.  For 
business this is a confusing system.  We would prefer a system 
that allows us to build relationships with one vendor. 
    
    This is the other way it looks to business.  This is what 
happened to us.  We did actually hire one person with a 
disability.  That is how we got started in project search.  It's 
probably a little bit of an exaggeration.  It felt like the next 
week, every other agency in town was sending in their job 
developers to talk to us to see if we would hire a person from 
their agency. 
    
    What this ended up doing was creating great confusion for us.  
It also caused us to stop and think, what is this business?  How 
are these people related?  How do I know who to work with?  It's 
a confusing system, to a business. 
    
    I want to talk about the marketing tactics.  I believe that 
this is one way if you really look at this, when you are 
approaching business, it's one big way in which you really can 
add value to what you are doing. 
    
    From a business point of view, at least initially, when I was 
approached about hiring people with disabilities, I was kind of 
blown away, because it was unlike any marketing I'd ever 
experienced before.  I really would call it deficit marketing or 
marketing by negative descriptors. 
    
    First of all, it would tend to always be about a cold call.  
That is pretty much an anathema to business.  When you make a 
cold call to anybody in the business environment it's perceived 
as a rude behavior, as not having done your homework.  It almost 
sets you up in a negative place whether you deserve to be there 
or not. 
    
    The second thing I was amazed by is everyone who came and 
talked to me would start off the conversation by talking about 
job carving.  It's funny for me.  When I hear carving, I think 
of Thanksgiving.  I had no idea what job carving meant.  When 
I've spoken at businesses across the country, few of us know 
what that means.  That means, and I think more importantly, 
businesses job carve every day.  I'll give you two examples.
     
    When I hired an administrative assistant, her job description 
was quite lengthy.  Among other things, it asked that she know 
how to do Power Point, and Excel and Access.  And the truth is, 
I hired a person who only knew how to do Power Point.  In your 
world, you might have called that job carving, and stressed that 
as a negative. 
    
    In my world, I look at that as a potential for job growth.  
And we look at the skills that a person brings, recognizing that 
everybody coming into a job is going to need to learn and grow 
into that system. 
    
    Businesses don't necessarily look at that as a negative.  And 
would never call it job carving.  It's expected business 
practice.  Another example would be a grant writer that I work 
with.  When her position was posted, we wanted somebody who had 
lengthy work and disability services, and we wanted somebody who 
had written grants to the Department of Labor and the Department 
of Education. 
    
    We ended up hiring a microbiologist, who just happened to be a 
good writer.  But again, we didn't stress the negative by 
calling it job carving. 
    
    Hopefully, that makes sense to you in terms of how you can add 
value by watching your language. 
    
    The other thing that we started noticing as a business is that 
when job developers and job coaches would come to us, they would 
almost always ask for the easiest jobs.  What are your easiest 
jobs?  Do you have any jobs in the cafeteria?  Do you have any 
jobs in your cleaning service?  Which almost, if you are a 
businessperson, you are sitting there, listening to that, you 
are wondering what's wrong with the person they are trying to 
market?  That up front, they are asking for the easiest jobs.  
What's that about? 
    
    The other thing is, I often ask or told that I would be 
eligible for tax credits, that it would be possible for me to 
offer a sub-minimum wage, that in some cases if I hire a person 
with a disability, they might be eligible for subsidized salary 
support for three months.  And they would get job coaching.  For 
me, in terms of marketing, I'll repeat what I said earlier, 
these really to business are deficit marketing tactics.  It's 
marketing a product or a person by telling the business up front 
all the negatives about this person.
     
    It seems like an odd strategy when there are so many people 
with disabilities who need employment, and it also isn't 
necessary from a business point of view.  I also talk about job 
coaching a lot.  Job coaching to business is what we refer to as 
orientation.  Every new nurse who is hired at Children's 
Hospital in Cincinnati, goes through six months of an 
orientation, and she has a preceptor with her the entire time 
who is paid to do the job.  Yet we don't use a special lingo or 
special language to denote deficiency.  We just refer to it as 
orientation, with support. 
    
    One other thing that I notice quickly, we actually hired 13 
people with disabilities.  And I was very naive, and I believed 
that I was hiring 13 people with disabilities.  What I didn't 
know and didn't understand about the system was that not only 
had I hired 13 people with disabilities, but because of the way 
the system operates, I was also going to get 13 job developers, 
13 job coaches, and 13 follow along staff. 
    
    The truth is, business can tolerate quite often 13 people with 
disabilities.  What we struggle with is 39 support staff, from 
13 different agencies, who believe that they can take up our 
parking spaces, come in and out of our business without giving 
any notice, not follow our procedures for orientation, or 
testing, not have a name badge, and kind of wander through our 
system without any direct relationship to us.
    
    When we started this, when we originally hired those 13 
people, the hospital quickly said, again, we don't have an issue 
with your 13 employees with disabilities.  We do have an issue 
with the 39 people who are constantly coming in and out and 
supporting them.  We had to look at a system that added value to 
business, and this does not, this may add value to the agency 
but as far as business is concerned, this is actually quite a 
negative. 
    
    It does not allow us to establish a relationship.  It's very 
hard to work with 39 different people.  What we developed as a 
result of looking at these issues and trying to come up with a 
system that would truly add value to business, was what we call 
a single point of entry.  It is a standard business practice.
     
    It means that when we work with people with disabilities, we 
use a preferred vendor system.  So as a business, we went out 
into the community, and we invited an agency and a school to 
partner with us.  We wanted to know their staff.  We wanted to 
have a relationship with them, that was mutual. 
    
    We wanted to be a part of the process including making some 
decisions.  We wanted to have people who were on-site but had 
name badges, knew our practices, had gone through our 
orientation, so we set up a preferred vendor system which 
allowed us to establish relationships.  That has been the 
critical, one of the critical pieces of project search and why 
we have been successful across the country. 
    
    Some of the key differences between our program and what I 
would consider traditional rehab practices, is that we don't 
allow people to volunteer.  I always take some flak for this.  
The truth is, I know that volunteering is very good and there 
are awesome opportunities when used appropriately.  But again, 
what I find especially in healthcare is that often, the people 
who are working in support of people with disabilities, when 
they come to a business, the first door they knock on is the 
head of the volunteer office. 
    
    No one else does that.  If we are working with nursing 
students or medical students, or child life students, none of 
those folks come through the volunteer office.  They don't think 
to go there first.  For some reason in the disability community, 
there tends to be a thought that that is where you need to go 
first.  I don't think it's business that is asking that.  I 
think it's become a long standing practice.  What happens 
though, is that we get an immediate message that the group with 
whom you are working, the person with whom you are working, 
needs to volunteer and probably is not capable of paid 
employment.  It's a subtle message that ends up being a deficit 
marketing tactic. 
    
    What we say to folks with disabilities who want to volunteer, 
volunteering is a great thing, but we approach it as part of 
normal life.  If you have a job or you are independently wealthy 
or you are retired, and you want to volunteer to give back to 
the community, that's great.  But if you are looking at 
volunteering as your only entrance into the work world, then you 
are sending instead a message to that business that you are less 
capable of others who might come in through a traditional 
avenue. 
    
    The other thing we work on is having a collaborative 
relationship.  When we work with our schools and agencies, we 
know them.  We give them name badges.  We have the same group of 
people on site all the time.  We have offered them a deaf space, 
and they are present every day to help us work with our 
employees with disabilities.  We do not have an enclave.  The 
employees with disabilities do not report to me or to any one 
department.  They are scattered throughout the hospital just as 
any other employee would be.  But our on-site agency staff are 
there to support them in a daily basis, if they have an issue or 
a need.
    
    As I said, we have on-site staff.  Because we have on-site 
staff, and they are there every day, they develop an expertise 
in our field.  They begin to speak our language.  They learn the 
manager's names.  They become incredibly skilled and gifted in 
developing accommodations and adaptations.  It's an awesome way 
of working together.
     
    As I mentioned, they develop relationships with the 
departments, which is critical.  What that allows then, what I 
would say is that oftentimes jobs in big businesses aren't just 
posted positions.  Things happen as a matter of daily course.  
And if you are an outside agency, and you have no relationship, 
you are never privy to those jobs or positions, that may just 
happen.  But if you are inside the hospital and you are in a 
relationship, and you understand the business, then over time, 
people start to come to you, and say, you know what?  We are 
going to create a job and I think your folks might be able to do 
it, are you interested?
     
    We found that in the past ten years, probably half of our jobs 
have come about because we have developed relationships with the 
department heads, between the agencies that they would never 
have had the opportunity to develop in a traditional system. 
    The other key thing is that we are able to have an immediate 
response to any changes or problems.  I'll give you a good 
example.  We stock the supplies in the emergency room.  There is 
probably four to 500 different types of supplies in every single 
room.  There is 58 rooms.  The truth is, supplies change a lot.  
So today I might use a Wyatt Abbocath, which is a needle, and 
tomorrow I might use a Norton and that E-mail might come to me 
from the materials management department.  And they might say, I 
need you to swap them out tomorrow.  Instead of stocking five, 
we are going to stock six. 
    
    If I work with people with disabilities as is most 
traditionally done in the community, and someone just came in 
periodically to check on how they were doing, there would be 
absolutely no way we could find out about that change in 
supplies, or that the person with the disability could be there 
to make the change.
    
    Over time, that happened on a weekly basis, that person would 
lose their job.  But because we have an on-site person, and we 
are in a relationship, the on-site agency staff is there every 
day to hear about these changes, step in, make a plan to address 
them, do ongoing job training or orientation, and we are able to 
keep people in very complex jobs for 7, 8, 9 years. 
    
    Because they are on-site in one business, they become experts 
in accommodations and adaptations.  You will see that later with 
some of my slides.  They also step in with our department heads, 
and assist with feedback, evaluations and mandatory education.  
That has been critical for us.  Maybe most importantly, they are 
there when our staff with disabilities have benefit questions 
and it happens all the time.  As a business and it may sound 
terrible, but businesses have objectives.  They are interested 
in diversity.  But they are not really interested in becoming 
experts in all of the benefit questions that may be out there.
     
    So when you step in as an agency, and you offer to be present 
in a relationship and take the burden for answering those 
benefit questions off of the business, then you have done a 
great service for them. 
    
    And they come to see you as a tremendous partner, who is going 
to be a value in many areas. 
    
    What this has allowed us to do is look for nontraditional 
jobs.  In our system and our program across the country, we 
don't look for the easiest jobs.  We look for jobs that are 
complex and systematic, because we have the system to support 
them.  It's interesting, every time I hear that approximately 50 
percent of people with significant disabilities are working in 
food service and cleaning, I'm constantly amazed by that, 
because it's true it's honorable work, but there is no way that 
60 percent of any population desires to work in one field.  It's 
totally beyond the realm of belief. 
    
    It has to be something that we as support staff are doing that 
keeps them in those types of jobs.  We look at it differently.  
We instead look for jobs that are complex, but systematic, that 
we can support by having agency staff on site. 
    
    Now what I want to do is run through some of our positions, 
talk a little about them, and just give you some idea from a 
business point of view of how incredibly important our 
relationship with agencies and rehab folks has been.
     
    It has been such a huge benefit to our hospital.  We also have 
programs in banks and universities and park districts.  And over 
and over again we see the same things happening.  Hopefully, you 
will come away today with some sense of how you add value, both 
of the agency and as people with disabilities to big business.  
This is Gretchen Ketters.  I have permission to use their names 
and disability, to disclose that with you today.  Gretchen 
worked for us for about eight years.  She stocks supplies on two 
entire units in our hospital. 
    
    What is amazing to me, when I first started this, as a 
businessperson, I didn't know about disability.  I probably had 
very arrogant business ideas about what a person with a 
disability could and couldn't do because of what I had seen in 
the community. 
    
    I thought they had to be able to count as high as I could and 
know the name of every piece of equipment in order to work in 
the business.  And I have this lofty notion that our work was so 
important, that maybe people with disabilities couldn't do it. 
    
    And my epiphany happened one day when I was looking at the 
jobs we were doing and the support staff, and I looked at my 
budgets.  What I found is that as a hospital, more than half of 
our revenue comes from providing medical care to people with 
chronic illnesses and disabilities.  People with disabilities 
right now in the United States have more disposable income than 
all adolescents age birth to 21.  In terms of financial power, 
it's immense. 
    
    Businesses are just beginning to wake up to this fact.  It's 
part of the reason why businesses are interested.  And you can 
use that to your advantage. 
    
    But when we hired Gretchen, the truth is that she is not a 
strong counter.  I had no idea how a young woman who couldn't 
count beyond ten could ever stock supplies. 
    
    But again, I apologize for laboring the point, but we were in 
relationship with the agency.  And they were able, because we 
knew them and trusted them, to teach us so much as a business, 
that we would never have known.  And what those are, these are 
golf beads.  If you are a bad golfer, you will know that it's a 
string of ten beads that you hang on your belt loop.  It's like 
a mini abacus.  You can move the beads up and down on the 
string.  Gretchen stocks two entire units at our hospital.  She 
goes in and out of rooms on two departments.  Every piece of 
equipment that goes in there, she is placing.  The way she does 
it is by counting on these golf beads.  I wouldn't even have 
thought to ever have used them.  Nor would our hospital. 
    
    Now we have a number of people who use different systems and 
they can still do the job.  They just have to have a small 
accommodation. 
    
    We also have folks who use counting boards.  It's become 
commonplace for us.  We have learned as a business that it's not 
important that you be able to count as high as we can.  It's 
important that our jobs can be broken down into 5s and 10s.  We 
have also learned that no matter how important we think we are, 
most of our jobs can be broken down into 5s and 10s.  It's been 
a real lesson for us at being inclusive. 
    This is Elizabeth.  You can see her using a counting board.  
She has Down syndrome and stocks another two of our units.  
Again meaning she goes into rooms, works with patient carts and 
is putting equipment in and out of the carts. 
    
    As a hospital, talking about the benefits that you bring, 
employment is a major concern for our patients.  Literally, if 
you think about it, in over half of our revenue comes from 
treating patients with chronic illnesses and disabilities and it 
does in every hospital, then employment is a major concern for 
folks who are coming in and out of every hospital in America.
     
    In fact, we did a survey, and we looked at our kids with 
chronic illnesses and disabilities.  And we asked them what was 
most important in their life.  I think we probably thought they 
were going to say healthcare, because they have a chronic 
illness or disability.  We must have thought we were the most 
important.  In fact, the number one answer was employment.  They 
care more about employment than they do about their health 
status. 
    
    What we learned from that and what healthcare and other 
businesses learn from that is that if we provide for them jobs, 
if we provide for them role models, they are more likely to be 
compliant with their own healthcare. 
    
    That factors in whether you are a child or adult.  This is 
Heidi.  Heidi had been a patient at our hospital her entire 
life.  She is now about 27, 28 years old.  Heidi has a 
significant disability.  But she takes care of, she sterilizes 
and processes every isolette used in our hospital.  We have a 55 
bed neonatal intensive care units.  Every one of our critical 
babies is going into an isolette that has been sterilized and 
prepared by a young woman with a significant disability. 
    
    But what we found is that Heidi values this job.  She knew 
what it was like to be a patient.  She loves working at the 
hospital.  She is a great role model for everybody who walks 
through our hallway.
     
    She knows that this job is important.  She looks for each 
isolette has over 44 removable parts.  She has to change the 
filter, the wiring, check the electrical, the water levels.  
Everything about this isolette is in Heidi's hands.  We learned 
she is the most trustworthy employee we could ever have doing 
this job. 
    
    What is fascinating to me about this, is Heidi has worked for 
us for nine years, and this is how she learned her job, through 
pictures on the wall.  I never would have thought of it.  The 
hospital would never have known how to do this. 
    
    This was an added value to our business.  But they put it up 
and it is still up there.  It is not up there because Heidi 
needs it.  It's up there because she works for a company called 
Sodexho Marriott, one of our contract agencies.  And Sodexho 
Marriott, any time they hire a new manager, they train them 
regionally.  Heidi, a young woman with a significant disability, 
trains every new manager hired by Sodexho Marriott working east 
of the Mississippi.  In the past two years, she trained 198 
people.  She has two more to get to 200.  You talk about added 
value to a business.  This is unbelievable for us.  Not just for 
us, but it's become added value for all of Sodexho Marriott east 
of the Mississippi. 
    
    Another thing about Heidi, in addition to her fairly severe 
cognitive and physical disabilities, she has epilepsy.  When she 
was starting to train these managers, she would occasionally 
have seizures.  And the department came to us and said, we are 
not sure what to do with that.  The managers are nervous about 
Heidi and her seizure disorder.  We sat down with Heidi and her 
mom and said, let's come up with two or three sentences that 
honorably describe Heidi's seizure disorder and give her 
business cards.  Every time she orients a manager, she turns to 
them, hands them her business card, asks them to read the back 
of the card, and it's a done deal.
     
    It's no longer an issue. 
    
    So now, we use business cards like this to add value to many 
of our employees with disabilities.  It normalizes the whole 
procedure.  It treats them like we would any other employee.  It 
takes away some of the negative stigma.
     
    We have found that positions from every specialty in a 
hospital look to project search now to provide hope and role 
models for their patients with chronic illnesses and 
disabilities.  I was stopped by a physician in the hallway the 
other day.  She said to me literally, I am the head of the 
genetics department.  She said, I meet with families every day.  
I'm giving them what might be perceived as bad or unfortunate 
news.  She said, what I tell them at the end of our conversation 
is that they should go downstairs in our main hallway, and 
should spend a half hour to an hour walking through our 
hospital.  And looking at all the people with disabilities who 
work here, and are doing incredibly important work. 
    
    It gives them hope, but not only does it give them hope, it 
gives me hope as a physician.  She started talking about Tim.  
He works at our hospital.  He has severe cerebral palsy.  He is 
probably 35 years old now.  Tim has been working for us for ten 
years.  He does all of our lab billing.  The truth is he uses a 
key guard.  His key strokes may not be as high as mine.  But his 
quality is better.  He makes fewer mistakes.  As a business, we 
care less about speed than we do about accuracy.  Tim is very 
accurate.  Part of what your added benefit is, is to teach us, 
to coach us, in how work can get done, that accuracy is more 
important than speed.
     
    And that there is always some leeway for working with people 
with disabilities.  We have folks that use one-handed keyboards.  
Folks who use what I call an air mouse, a mouse that you use on 
a vertical plain.  Over and over, we find that there are things 
that never existed, that through our relationship, have become 
an invaluable tool, not just for employees with disabilities but 
for all of our employees. 
    
    Hiring people with disabilities can improve performance and 
increase retention, in positions with chronically high turnover. 
    
    In our clinical sterilization department, we found that the 
average number of days on the job, of years, was 2.4.  When we 
began hiring people with disabilities, their average tenure is 
six years.  We more than doubled that.  This is a young woman by 
the name of Jill.  She has Down syndrome.  She works in our 
sterilization department.  She is putting together and 
sterilizing trays that go into our operating room.  Talk about a 
critical job.  We are not talking about jobs if you make a 
mistake, it's not a big deal.  We have not looked at it and said 
we have people with disabilities, let's give them the easiest 
job.  We have found with the proper support, people with 
disabilities have become some of our most reliable employees, in 
some of our most complex areas. 
    
    It turns the whole thing on its head.  But Jill sterilizes all 
these instruments and tools.  She is preparing trays for 
laparotomies and tracheotomies.  That is abdominal surgery.  
These instruments have to be perfectly aligned and sterilized.  
We have people with disabilities doing this job.  For us it has 
been a tremendous added value. 
    
    Not only that though, when we first hired Jill, this was the 
manual they gave us to teach her how to do the job.  It's what 
they use with most of their employees.  The agency said, that is 
nice.  But it's not going to work for Jill.  Do you care if I 
modify it?  This is what we got back.  We got back a book, that 
had pictures and measurements and was very clear, and about two 
weeks after we put this book in place, the department head came 
to us and said, your books are so much better than what we are 
currently using.  Could you create a book for us for every 
single tray?  So now that department every single person who is 
hired uses a book modeled after a book that was put together for 
a person with a disability.  Talk about added value. 
    
    You can only work with businesses through relationships and 
get to know them well enough to create these kinds of tools. 
    
    Children with disabilities and their families make up a 
significant market segment.  I know I'm preaching to the choir.  
This is our program at the bank.  We have a school program 
there.  We have 12 students.  This is the first day we opened 
our classroom. 
    
    I would bet you every student and every family in this class 
now banks with Fifth Third.  And all of their extended family 
members bank with Fifth Third.  Because their perception of them 
has changed.  They are getting good employees, and they are 
sending a message to society, that Fifth Third is a good and 
caring and gentle place to work. 
    
    There is a perception by society that if you work with people 
with disabilities, you must be a good place to work for all of 
your employees. 
    
    So the added benefit there is tremendous.  Families with 
vested interests in issues with disabilities are high donors 
with giving potential.  As a business and as a hospital, this 
has been something we never expected.  I talk about Kirk.  We 
hired Kirk ten years ago.  We didn't know his family had a 
family foundation.  But in fact, they did.
     
    They had never given to disability causes before.  But before 
we knew it, because we were working with Kirk, they were sending 
foundation money to the hospital.  That's happened over and over 
again.  There are many families who have connections and ties 
and if you reach out, and you work with those families, quite 
often it becomes financially of benefit to your business. 
    
    A great example at Fifth Third, they have people now who are 
switching their accounts to the bank, and they also are getting 
folks who have foundations like Kirk's family, who says, if you 
are going to work with people with disabilities and with 
projects search, we are going to move our foundations to your 
bank.  Always opportunities for added benefit. 
    
    The American public thinks highly of companies that hire 
people with disabilities.  Neil Romano, he has done a webcast 
before I think, just completed a tremendous study that said that 
88 percent of Americans say that they would prefer to do 
business with a company that hires people with disabilities over 
a similar competitor that does not.  We have certainly found 
that to be the case.
     
    People believe we are better because we hire people with 
disabilities.  That we must have better physicians and better 
nurses.  That we must be more caring, for our families and our 
patients.
     
    So the benefits have just been myriad.  Things we never 
expected. 
    
    There will be labor shortage as the population ages.  There 
already is.  People with disabilities can be trained to do very 
complex work, that other staff may undervalue.  They can do it 
with pride and accountability.  This is a classic example.  At 
our hospital we use these symmetry probes.  They can be 
recycled.  They cost the hospital $18 now new.  They can be 
recycled one time for $6.  We were throwing them all out because 
we didn't have anybody who would pick them up, process them, and 
send them in.  We couldn't find anybody to do the job. 
    
    So, the agency that we work with said, how about a person with 
a disability?  We hired Nick.  The truth is Nick doesn't count 
well.  He really only has strength in one arm.  And in order to 
process these when we first started, you had to put them in a 
package of 40, you had to wipe them down with a sterilizing 
agent, and you had to be able to look at the head and make sure 
that the wires weren't broken. 
    Even I after some experience with this program was kind of 
surprised when we hired Nick, because he couldn't count to 40.  
He couldn't wipe it down independently and check it.  But what 
our partners built for us was a standing lazy Susan.  It's a 
jig, and they cut 40 holes, 40 slots into the top.  They made it 
so that Nick can get his wheelchair under it.  Now all he has to 
do is fill every slot and they are automatically 40, and it 
eliminates counting.  Because they are hanging, he can wipe it 
down with one hand, and a sterilizing agent.  Last year by 
performing this one job, our hospital made $225,000.  We have 
been throwing these out for years.  I know hospitals all over 
the country that are still throwing them out, because they 
cannot find somebody to value this work. 
    
    Universal design, this has been huge for us.  If I were a 
rehab person, I'd be all over this in terms of marketing.  It's 
such a missed opportunity, I think.  But what we have found is 
by working with people with disabilities, we put things in place 
which have become universal design for all our employees. 
    
    In our storeroom, we had a person with low vision, and we 
needed to enlarge the print.  I think you can see it on the bin 
at the left.  What happened is that the staff in the department 
went through and took all of our little labels and put them up 
over the small labels, because everybody recognizes that the 
larger label is easier to read.
     
    It was done for a person with a disability.  It served 
everybody.
     
    The same thing in our storeroom where we keep our food.  We 
have a person who is not our reader, and she stocks all of our 
kitchens and all of our units.  What they did for her when we 
hired her, they took pictures of everything in the department.  
It's fascinating to me.  She doesn't use these anymore.  She 
knows where we keep our mayonnaise and miracle whip and 
chocolate chip cookies.  But the department will call us when 
one of these signs is missing, or when they get a new item.  
Because what they have found is that processing words is faster 
for everybody than processing, sorry, processing pictures is 
faster for everybody than processing words.  It makes sense, and 
the entire department likes it.  Now we have pictures and no one 
probably even remembers that they were put there for a person 
with a disability.
     
    This is EJ, who stocks our emergency department.  We have a 
58-bed emergency department.  It's one of the largest pediatric 
emergency departments in the country.  EJ has autism.  When he 
started, we kept five sizes of gloves, sterile gloves.  We kept 
three pair of each size.  We would throw them into the bottom 
drawer with a rubber band around each set of three. 
    
    EJ  had trouble figuring out which packet needed a glove and 
how to get the gloves in and out of the rubber band.  So the 
person working with him said, do you care if I redesign your 
drawer?  Heck, we didn't care.  It was great for us! It was a 
true gift.  We had never thought of it.  They came in and 
redesigned our drawers.  We noticed immediately that we were 
saving tens of thousands of dollars.  The reason why is that 
sterile gloves when they went in and grabbed them, if we pull 
out the wrong size and opened it, we had to throw it away and 
put on a different size.  If we grabbed it and pulled it out of 
the rubber band, sometimes rubber band ripped the side and they 
were no longer sterile.  We were losing gloves because of how we 
were storing them.  But it never dawned on us to look at 
considering a different way, until we hired a person with a 
disability. 
    
    Hiring employees with disabilities brings new sources of 
ideas, creativity and problem solving into the workplace.  I 
apologize for my voice.  I had flu last week.  I'm still quite 
hoarse. 
    
    This is a young woman by the name of Esther.  She works at 
Fifth Third bank in our program there.  She works in what is 
called the vault, where they keep all of the signature cards for 
all of their big corporate customers.  It's incredibly important 
area.  There are a number of people who work there.  About two 
days after Esther started working there, a couple people came 
out and said, we think Esther doesn't know how to file.  We went 
and investigated.  The truth is, in those two days, she had just 
been being oriented, and she hadn't even filed anything yet.  
But because a person with a disability was placed there, people 
were looking at things differently.  So we went in and we did 
a -- and that is not good.  I'm the first to say that is a 
problem but it does happen.
     
    What it did is gave us an opportunity to go in and assess what 
was going on in that department.  What we found is that people 
were using three different ways of filing.  So for years, they 
had been filing according to three different ways, and they 
didn't even know it.  For years, they hadn't been able to find 
their files.  They were hunting and searching.  Because we put a 
person with a disability in there, we gave everybody a test.  
And said, how do you file?  Not just Esther.  Everybody working 
in the department.  How do you file?  Here which one, what 
standard way do you want to use?  We were able to go back and 
retrain everybody in the department on one filing system.
     
    They would never have thought to have done it.  It's 
definitely added value.  I want to finish up with just a slide 
and a little story. 
    
    I think that sometimes rehab agencies, you do need to be 
reminded of the critical value that you play in business or that 
you are capable of playing.  And how you can educate employers 
like myself and bring us along so we understand over time. 
    
    But just last year, Prince Edward from England came and toured 
our program.  Sometimes I, you get to a cocky place and you 
think that because you work with people with disabilities, that 
you understand them.  And we tend sometimes to underestimate 
them.  You fall into this trap of underestimating. 
    
    We were touring Prince Edward around the hospital looking at 
some of our jobs.  We were talking about Jill.  We were going on 
and on, for some reason, about the fact that Jill didn't care 
how much she made, and Jill would work even if she didn't get a 
paycheck.  Money wasn't important.  She just loved being at the 
hospital.  She was a great employee.  She worked, we must have 
said this a dozen different ways, and I looked back on it and 
I'm embarrassed, because I'm not sure what our point was.  But 
it was underestimating her potential.
     
    But I learned a lesson that day, that has stuck with me about 
the value of people with disabilities.  And how I should never 
underestimate.  Because at the end of the visit, Prince Edward 
stood up and bowed to Jill and he shook her hand and said, you 
know, Jill, I bet this has been a very big day in your life.  
And Jill looked at Prince Edward and said, it's a great day, 
it's payday!
    
    It's not what we expected.  It's not what the Prince expected.  
But it was a lesson to us, that people with disabilities have 
the same feelings, the same thoughts, same needs.  They are not, 
just because they have a disability, doesn't mean, it's not the 
equivalent of being a non-thinking person.  And Jill showed us 
that day, that we should never ever underestimate the ability of 
people with disabilities.
     
    So I want to leave you with just one quote.  It's my favorite 
quote by Margaret Meade.  She said:  If we are to achieve a 
richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize 
the whole gamut of human potentialities, so we have a less 
arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse gift will 
find a fitting place.  What we try to do in Project Search and 
what all of you try to do is find a fabric in which each diverse 
gift has a fitting place.  I thank you for that. 

  
					      *****



 
 
 
 


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