Erin Gray is the Assistant Vice Chancellor and Clinical Liaison for Environmental Services (EVS), Nutritional Services, and Institutional Support Services which falls under Campus Operations. She has been with UAMS for close to 15 years and has been in her current role for over two years.
Interview by Brittany Tian and Claire Gist Bradberry
Guest Editor: Adam Williams
We would love to hear more about your role at UAMS because it seems very important, but I think it’s something that people might not be familiar with.
I have close to a 800 employees in my divisions. My areas cover the EVS (Environmental Services) group, Transport group, Hospitality staff, Occupational Health and Safety staff, patient food, retail, and special programs including our employee-student food pantry. Basically, many of the things that keep the wheels moving in the hospital; that’s what Campus Operations does.
People don’t think about it a lot, but when you are looking at turning over a bed or turning over a room, my teams are on those calls, and we are a pretty critical part in keeping patient flow moving. From the time I started this role, my goal has been for us to be invisible. I want my teams to be so good at their jobs that nobody ever sees us, kind of like Disney.
We also contribute a lot to the front lines of safety. Cleanliness in hospitals is safety. That means all the high touch points have been taken care of, it means that there have been contact precautions in the room. We do extra assessments of any high touch point spaces to make sure that they’re safe for the next patient. We are part of the frontline team that comes in, not only to make sure that rooms are clean, but so that we prevent infections or other unsafe working conditions.
When I started in my current role, patient satisfaction ratings were in the 20th percentile and now we’re in the 75th and 80th percentile. We have come a long way. We value our team members, and we want to make sure that they know that they do things that nobody else can do. We want people to recognize that we are an important part of the system.
Patient food is a huge part of what we do. Not only do we feed patients in the hospital, we also and prepare and deliver food to the Orthopaedic and Spine Hospital three times a day. Our kitchen is responsible for feeding all the children at the Child Development Center as well.
We maintain seven different retail spaces across the various UAMS campuses. Patient transport and our hospitality group (behind the Info desk, handling wheelchairs, and driving patient carts) is a part of our Campus Operations team.
Our Occupational Health and Safety Department handles all lab safety and waste stream disposal – all the things nobody wants to think about at a hospital/medical school/research facility. OH&S keeps us safe and regulates those areas. Finally, we oversee all the disposal of waste through the Department of Environmental Quality.
It is a big, big job! It’s a lot of different areas and moving pieces. There is a lot of firefighting, but we have gotten good at preventing forest fires. That was one of my goals with this job: to be less firefighter and more Smokey the Bear, and we have made progress there. I really enjoy it. It’s never the same day twice, but it’s a very rewarding job.
What would you say has been the most rewarding project for you or your biggest accomplishment in your current role here at UAMS?
We’ve had a lot of big wins, but I’d have to say it is probably the opening of the Orthopaedic and Spine Hospital.
Opening the Orthopaedic and Spine Hospital was a real challenge for all the groups that I manage. The timeline changed. We had to pull all of that together and make sure that patients were fed when there was not a kitchen there. We had to reconfigure to plan for that. We had to make sure that all the permits were timely obtained to be able to run all that equipment. We had to make sure the patient rooms were clean and ready.
In addition, there is a retail space there that we had to create with a new menu and staff and get that off the ground. So, if I’m thinking about probably the biggest thing that we have done with all my groups, that would be the biggest accomplishment of this organization during my tenure.
It was a monumental effort to the point of us being there in the wee hours of the morning and putting the finishing touches on the rooms to make sure they were ready to go. It was a real team effort and a proud moment to get the doors open there. And it’s remained a challenging space, but I’m proud that everybody came together to make that happen.
What have been some of the big changes you have seen during your 15 years at UAMS?
The one thing that is constant about UAMS is change. It has changed so much over the years. I was first hired as the Director of Volunteer Services. I moved from that role to Director of Patient Experience. Moving to the operations side was a pretty big shift for me. As the hospital’s focus shifted to patient experience, it impacted how I viewed my role and everything I do. That vantage point of balancing the needs of the institution while striving to keep patients happy and well cared for is part of why I was hired to be in this operational role.
When I moved to this role, I wanted to make sure we didn’t lose focus on the patient experience side when we’re handling operations. How are patients affected when something is not clean or broken? How does that make patients feel? How does that make families feel? Do I feel safe here? How do we do a better job of making sure that our patients are eating and getting the nutrition that they need?
Those type of questions have been at the forefront of my mind, and that’s been a change since when I first joined UAMS.
Additionally, Covid changed everything. Many of my exceptional employees who never seem to struggle, were really challenged during Covid. Everybody was a little road weary, right? We were all trying to do more with less and trying to be better with less. While everything was overwhelming and scary, being here at UAMS, the hub for healthcare for our state, I think it made us realize how dependent we are on each other – as employees, as families, as UAMS teams, and as a state.
I still walk in here and feel like it is home. There are people that I’ve walked in the doors with that are here today that were with me 15 years ago and in the trenches with me during Covid in 2020. The commitment to serve everyone is the thing that has stood the test of time, and I hope we always stay true to that commitment. It’s more challenging during times like Covid, serving everyone and treating every patient that walks in the door. But it is part of what has hooked me in and keeps me here at UAMS because I think it’s critically important.
Did you always know that you wanted to work to help people?
I have. Before UAMS, I worked in nonprofit management. I was an executive director for a nonprofit agency that specialized in auditory verbal therapy. So, in a way I was already connected to healthcare, certainly already in the nonprofit realm.
But I have also always been really interested in the operational side, and it was my boss when I was the Director of Patient Experience who said I really think that you would be good at operations.
I think all my past experiences have brought me to where I am, and I really love operations. I love being able to solve problems. I love being able to work with my team, and I always have been more a coach leader [editor’s note: a coach leadership style focuses on developing team members as individuals through one-on-one communication, empowering them, and fostering a sense of ownership and accountability].
For me, if UAMS has a flood or we are getting behind on workflow, it’s important to me that my employees see that I can and will jump in and help them. I want them to know that I am there with them; that we are all part of this team; and sometimes we get asked to do really impossible things.
So it is very meaningful, I think, for my team to see me being willing to strap on a hairnet – which is not my favorite thing by the way, nobody looks good in a hairnet – but I think that’s really important for them to see, and all of the work that I’ve done previously, has prepared me to be that type of leader.
Do you have any tips for being in a leadership role and how you think someone else can improve being a leader?
I think, especially in a hospital environment, it is so important to remember that there’s rarely anything that you do as a leader that’s not going to impact somebody else.
When you’re making decisions it’s always better to bring everybody to the table. It’s much better to do that than to get halfway down the road in the project and realize you have not thought about nursing, or you have not thought about the physician side of it, or you have not thought about EVS.
It is important to make sure that you are not just making decisions about yourself and your team but thinking about the campus-wide impact and who to engage with to get the best outcome.
Is there anything else you would like us to know about your work?
Another tip I would give for the clinical side is to not forget about the operations people. They are really important. They are entry-level people. They make $15 an hour. But, for the most part, the people on my team take a lot of pride in their work. Their work is important to them, and it puts food on their table. They want to feel like they are part of a team. They do not want to mess up, and they want to be appreciated for what they do.
If nobody is turning over those rooms, feeding patients, making sure that you have protective equipment, then everything stops. I would really urge you not to forget that, and to get to know those people because they are pretty cool individuals!
I adore my team. I have almost eight hundred people, and I can’t tell you that I know all of them, but I make sure they all know who I am and how to reach me directly. And I do my very best to know a lot about what’s going on in their lives.
They often feel like second-class citizens. I get calls a lot, and one of my least favorite calls is someone saying that I have staff that are just sitting around on their phones when they should be working. Most of the time they are on their break. Our staff doesn’t really have break areas. They are taking a break a lot of times or are waiting on a rideshare.
And I don’t know that people would make those phone calls to department chairs if they saw a doctor sitting on that bench, or a nurse sitting on that bench. So, do not judge a book by its cover. Give them the respect they deserve for a really hard job that not a lot of people would do. They are important people, and they are very important to me.
They also do a really good job, especially if you consider all that they’re up against. So, whatever hospital you are at, be sure you look at those people a little differently because they are part of your team.
I have the best job at UAMS. I really believe that. This is the coolest job to me, because when I call my team, they really want to jump on it and get the work done. They will tell you that we are the front line for safety, and that we have a duty to protect our patients.
Look at the people on my team as your allies and weapons. If you guys ever want to come and meet my team, I would love for you to come and do it. I will strap a hairnet on you, and you are welcome to come and take a tour of the kitchen. If you would ever like to come and meet my team, I would love to introduce you. I am always willing to show people the other side of what it is that we do.
What do you enjoy to in your free time outside of work?
I am an only parent of two amazing kids. I have a 16-year-old son who is addicted to baseball. So, I spend a lot of time on a dirt field. I have an 18-year-old daughter who is about to go off to college. They have completely opposite personalities. And so, my primary role outside of here is just taking care of and enjoying my children. I also have a neurotic dog that I love a lot named Ruthie. She’s really goofy and funny, and I really love her, too.
Life is hectic. Honestly, I haven’t made it to bed before midnight all week. And my day starts about four o’clock in the morning. So, it’s a busy, busy time, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything. So that’s kind of my world right now and that’s enough.