Spotlight on Admissions Manager Tristan West, RN

New Position is Key to Central Referral Office Success

Reporting directly to Crossroads Senior Vice President of Operations Terri Doughty, Tristan West, RN, is Crossroads’ new Admissions Manager in the Central Referral Office.

A young Mom of three boys, one of them a brand-new baby, Tristan joined Crossroads last April as an Admissions Nurse in Dayton. Her positive impact in less than a year led to her promotion to the new centralized Admissions Manager position.

Now all the Admissions Nurses and Registration Representatives at each site report to Tristan. The numbers are increasing. Tristan said the goal is for each of Crossroads’ six sites to have four Assessment Nurses and two or three Registration Representatives as soon as possible.

When it comes to supporting Assessment Nurses in their role, education is Tristan’s number one priority. She drives to educate her team and patients’ families on the fundamentals of hospice care and its benefits.

It’s no surprise that education is one of Tristan’s areas of focus. Tristan is a nurse educator who was most recently a member of the faculty at Wright State University’s School of Nursing where she taught health assessment. She left Wright State to join Crossroads.

At Crossroads Tristan is responsible for direct supervision of all site Assessment Nurses including reviewing documentation and approving evaluations and competencies. She is also responsible for all new and existing Assessment Nurse training and gathering and analyzing important data on both site and individual conversion rates and other metrics.

Families’ Input Matters

Even as an expert in health assessment and clinical documentation, Tristan is passionate about taking families’ input into consideration when it comes to end-of-life care planning.

“I’m finding that some nurses rely solely on clinical data,” Tristan explained. “But many times they are just looking at records and reports, including medical charts that can be very vague. That’s only a part of the assessment.” Assessments are not “only objectively based on data, assessments also incorporate subjective data based on what the family is telling us.”

Tristan continued, “we’re there to give the family guidance but that means we have to know about disease processes and have the professional ability to have open conversations.” These topics are on Tristan’s education agenda moving forward.

For the moment as the Central Referral Office becomes established, Tristan expects that her team will have high impact on a more streamlined and efficient admissions process for Crossroads’ patients, their families and our referral partners.