Image Mary Garrelts stands next to an “art quilt” that she created and is on display in a School of Dentistry hallway with other works of art by faculty, students and staff. Entitled “I Had Questions …”, the artwork is Garrelts’ reflection on her 35 years of working at the school. It expresses “my gratitude for all the people here who have helped me to learn and grow over those years,” including “the many faculty who always answered my dentistry questions.” The piece features images of teeth, dentistry terms and an exterior view of the school. Garrelts learned to sew as a child, makes many of her clothes and uses her various needlework skills for a variety of artistic creations that she rotates on the walls of her office and gives as gifts. When Mary Garrelts began working at the University of Michigan School of Dentistry in 1990, she knew nothing about dentistry. Today, 35 years later, she speaks fluent dentistry, easily conversing and referencing the countless terms used to describe patient treatments performed by faculty and students in clinics throughout the school. For the last 25 years of her 35 at the school, Garrelts has been a Patient Care Coordinator. The position works with dental students to monitor their interaction with patients, with a particular emphasis working with students to diligently and ethically monitor follow-up care after initial appointments. In the process, Garrelts has made strong and longstanding ties with faculty and students, which she says is the most rewarding part of the job. During a recent interview, Garrelts talked about her role in the School of Dentistry.Q: Tell us about how you came to work at the dental school.A: My husband had taken a job in the U-M library system and I worked in retail at a couple of local fabric stores because of my sewing background and skills. I got tired of the retail hours and wanted better benefits so I looked for jobs at the university. I started at the dental school in 1990 at the first-floor information desk and was a float clerk for various departments when they had someone on vacation or someone called in sick. I worked in many departments and got to learn about how different areas did things differently. In Central Records, I helped pull, file and purge paper dental charts. In the Patient Business Office, I did payment posting to help process payments from insurance companies. Working at these different jobs, it was instrumental to helping me figure out how the pieces of the puzzle at the dental school fit together. After seven years of that, in 1997 I moved to the patient business office where I made payment plans for patients, called Medicaid for emergency extraction permissions and things like that. I did that for three years, then took the Patient Care Coordinator position in 2000.Q: The official title of your job has changed over the years, but the focus remains on helping dental students keep track of patient visits. Each of the four Patient Care Coordinators (PCCs) works with third-year and four-year students who treat patients in the four main DDS clinics. In effect, you are responsible for one-fourth of the third-year class and one-fourth of the fourth-year class. How has the job changed over the 25 years?A: It has evolved, but it has been an evolution, not a sea change. Things have been tweaked and modified, rather than changed wholesale. For my clinic, each month I monitor each student’s patient pool to determine if the students are taking good care of everyone in that pool. We give the students a patient management grade, which becomes part of the clinic grade they receive from faculty. That’s where the bulk of our time goes, probably at least 70 percent. I have 64 students – 32 third-year and 32 fourth-year. The D3s have 40 or 50 patients, and D4s have 50-75. To go through all those patients every month, three months every semester, and make sure we are taking good care of them, it is a lot of information to go through every single month. We are looking for patients who are overdue for their next appointment. We have some computer reminder tools – like overdue lists – so the students can be proactive. That can help, but a lot of it depends on us checking the records. We will be getting more computer-assisted tools when our new Epic system comes online later this year. If the students work that list and keep it tiny, because they’ve taken care of all the people who were overdue, then they are getting a good grade.Q: You seem to have picked up a lot about dentistry.A: You learn a lot of the vocabulary, you learn the order things have to be done in, particularly if you are a curious person, which I always have been. I abhor boredom, and so I have always been curious and I will ask lots of questions. Very early in my time here, some of the faculty were lovely to me in helping me cultivate that. Dr. Dan Snyder was acting clinic director. He would sit with me at lunch hour and let me ask all the questions I wanted. I could take notes. He said to me: I don’t want you to ever stop asking questions.Q: What is one of the more difficult things about your job?A: Our job is one of the few places in the curriculum where we can measure conscientiousness, where we can measure ethics. Our students do a great job, but if they get busy they can lag behind on follow-up calls, which would be an ethical problem. And we’re the ones who watch for that, document it and measure it. It’s not an easy thing to measure, ever. It doesn’t correlate well to a yardstick, but we work closely with students so over time we are able to establish a grade. To help teach students to behave in ethical ways for their patients is very, very rewarding. And it keeps me here. It keeps me wanting to meet the next group of young people who will be coming through the door.Q: You must get to know students really well.A: We are lucky that so many of our students, even when they graduate, feel quite a sense of family and kinship with the school here. One of my students from about 20 years ago, who is now an adjunct faculty member here, recently brought me a gift of chocolate-covered pretzels as a way of saying thanks. He has a successful practice and family now, but as a student he sort of thought he knew more than he actually did. When he brought the gift, he said, “How did you ever put up with that cocky kid I was?” And he said he wanted to go back and tell his younger self some things. And I said, “No, no, it was better for you to learn on your own and you turned out just fine.” That’s a rewarding moment. To have a former student come in here and say, “How did you put up with me?” and then, “Thank you for helping get me to where I am today.” It is very, very rewarding. This job is a teamwork thing. It really is. Sometimes students will ask me to write them letters of recommendation. I had one student, 15 years ago, who was buying a practice directly out of dental school and he used me as a reference with the bank to get the loan. He said the bank is going to care about how he would manage the business. And he told me: You are going to be able to tell them that better than my faculty can. ###The University of Michigan School of Dentistry is one of the nation’s leading dental schools engaged in oral healthcare education, research, patient care and community service. General dental care clinics and specialty clinics providing advanced treatment enable the school to offer dental services and programs to patients throughout Michigan. Classroom and clinic instruction prepare future dentists, dental specialists and dental hygienists for practice in private offices, hospitals, academia and public agencies. Research seeks to discover and apply new knowledge that can help patients worldwide. For more information about the School of Dentistry, visit us on the Web at: www.dent.umich.edu. Email: [email protected], or (734) 615-1971.
