Inside Look
Making Volunteering a Priority
What Can You Accomplish in 30 Minutes a Week?
By Rose T. Dunn, MBA, CPA, RHIA, FACHE, FAHIMA
EVERYONE CAN FEEL OVERWHELMED
with too many priorities at times. We all
have family priorities, social priorities,
and work priorities. And then there are
volunteer priorities, the ones we impose
on ourselves by carving out some of our
personal time or resources to contribute
to the good of a group.
Become a HIRO
AHIMA has many volunteers. The AHIMA Foundation’s most recent initiative,
the Health Information Relief Operation
(HIRO) Fund, was inspired by member
recommendations. The fund helps those
members who have been affected by natural disasters.
The HIRO Fund will live on as those disasters will never entirely go away. People who donate money to help those affected are “hiros.” But our donors are not
limited to just this fund. We have many
activities that are funded by donors, and
we thank each of them for volunteering
themselves or their firms to contribute to
AHIMA’s projects and endeavors.
We have volunteers that staff our many
councils, committees, task forces, and
boards. These volunteers donate their
time and expertise to AHIMA and help
it craft position statements that government and industry leaders rely on for direction about new issues and the impact
those issues have on our health information and patient care.
In addition, these volunteers create resources for members such as toolkits,
procedures, and practice briefs. Members rely on these tools to augment their
efforts to maintain up-to-date practices in
their work settings. And of course, these
volunteers serve to lead the association
down a path that will allow it to retain its
gold standard of recognition and health
information stewardship.
Committing to Volunteer
So why am I offering this subject as my
first installation to the journal? As many
of you know, I am interim in this role. My
other “day job” was spent managing a
firm, working in the trenches, and sharing
information, often at the CSA level.
Many CSAs have shared with me their
dilemma of finding a sufficient number of
volunteers. Everyone is buried with multiple priorities these days, and I understand the stress that health information
professionals are facing.
However, volunteering does not mean
giving up your job or subrogating another
priority. There are ways each of us can
volunteer.
First, decide how much time you will
contribute. Thirty minutes a week is fine.
That’s two hours a month or 24 hours a
year. What can you do in 30 minutes a
week? You can:
There are many things that each of us
can do that require only 30 minutes a
week.
