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Innovation, service win Flossmoor nurse special honors

Flossmoor resident Tiffany Victor-Castleberry will receive the Young Healthcare Executive Award on Feb. 12 from the Chicago Health Executive Forum (CHEF) of the American College of Health Executives.
 
She will be one of 10 honorees at the 43rd CHEF Annual Meeting at Soldier Field.

Flossmoor resident Tiffany Victor-Castleberry will receive the Young Healthcare Executive Award on Feb. 12 from the Chicago Health Executive Forum (CHEF) of the American College of Health Executives.
 
She will be one of 10 honorees at the 43rd CHEF Annual Meeting at Soldier Field.
 
  Tiffany
  Victor-Castleberry

 
Victor-Castleberry, 39, a nurse by profession, is director of discharge planning and utilization review in the Patient Care Services department at the University of Illinois Hospital & Health Sciences System. Her supervisor, Rani Morrison, senior director of care continuum in Patient Care Services, nominated her for this honor.
 
The award is given to a healthcare executive under age 40 in recognition of teamwork, service and innovation, as well as community health leadership.
 
In her position, Victor-Castleberry supervises a UIH department of 40 employees who work with patients when they are admitted, and the patient and their family members at the end of hospital care to make certain the patient’s needs are met once they are discharged.
 
For example, the staff will help find appropriate care, whether that would be home health visits or skills nursing care, and then make certain insurance companies are in line to pay for the care. When necessary, her staff works to make certain care is available, even when the patient can’t pay. 
 
In her nomination, Morrison said Victor-Castleberry helped create multi-disciplinary rounds. In this new process, representatives from social work, physical/occupational therapy, nursing unit directors, charge nurses and the chief resident meet daily to review patient needs.
 
“These rounds have led to improved physician and staff satisfaction, as well as more comprehensive care for the patients,” Morrison told the selection committee. “Through these rounds, insurance barriers have been identified and addressed, placement delays resolved and socio-economic concerns are addressed by the team holistically with input of key stakeholders.”
 
Victor-Castleberry always shows great care for patients, “even if the issue does not rest with her team.” She will readily mentor others; is a board member of Ignite Your Influence, an organization working to assist those in need;and is a member of the Illinois Organization of Nurse Leaders and Delta Sigma Theta Sorority.
 
Victor-Castleberry was a student at Northern Illinois University majoring in communications, but thought her passion was elsewhere. 
 
“I always had an affinity for healthcare,” she said. An advisor in the Applied Sciences Department at NIU, suggested she finish her degree. If she really wanted to try something in the medical field, she suggested Victor-Castleberry try nursing.
 
Victor-Castleberry worked for two years in the communications field before taking the professor’s advice. She enrolled full-time in the nursing program at Prairie State College. With her associate’s degree in hand, she began her second career at St. James Hospital-Olympia Fields working in the trauma/ICU department for five years.
 
During that time, Victor-Castleberry took on additional work as a home health nurse and thought about that nursing care specialty as the next step in her profession, but she was recommended for a sales liaison position with Amedisys, which she did for two years. 
 
That work put her in hospital settings, and the University of Chicago Hospitals offered her a position for bedside case manager. She did that for three years, then moved into a leadership role as assistant manager on the unit, but she also handled discharge planning. From there, she went to Mercy Hospital helping to establish a patient logistics unit and serving as manager. She left there for UIH, where she’s worked for two years.
 
During her career, Victor-Castleberry earned a master’s degree in nursing from the University of Phoenix, and she is now a doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Nursing with a focus on health systems, leadership and infomatics.
 
Victor-Castleberry and her husband, Troy Castleberry, are parents to his sons Troy Jr. and Nicholas, and their daughter Ainsley.

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