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CMC manager advocates for inmates’ health care—and for fellow employees

Will McWhorter is the first CMC representative on the UT System Employee Advisory Council

By Margaret Battistelli Gardner

Navigating health care for another person—a spouse, child, elderly parent, etc.—can be challenging. Multiply that by about 2,000—and situate it in a prison—and you have Will McWhorter’s job.

McWhorter is the senior practice manager for TDCJ’s Beauford H. Jester III and Carol S. Vance units in Richmond. As such, he manages all non-clinical activities in the units for a combined 2,000 inmates.

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“It’s a nice way of saying I’m the operations manager for doing anything that can be done in health care without a license,” he explained.

We're here to support our providers and our nursing staff and our specialists and do as much as we can—from scheduling to grievances and complaint response to coordinating with our TDCJ contract partners and outside agencies—so our clinical folks can focus on high-quality patient care.”

Day to day, that means a wide variety of things, from reviewing patient charts to reworking schedules around security, to overseeing transportation for high-importance appointments like chemotherapy or transplants.

“It’s almost like being the CEO of a small hospital, just in a correctional setting,” he said.

Whereas much of McWhorter’s work is behind the scenes, a big part of it involves conflict resolution and educating inmates on policies and procedures. Often, it’s a case of navigating around discrepancies in treatment plans between doctors and specialists or between the care a patient wants and what he requires.

McWhorter’s job is to visit and talk with patients to answer their questions and help coordinate their care. Sometimes, he said, he’s the “good guy” who resolves patients’ concerns and at other times he’s the “bad guy” who has to tell them, “No. I understand that this is what you want or what you think you need, but this is what's really clinically indicated.”

That coordination of care is a journey that can frustrate under the best of circumstances but is elevated when working within the prison system.

“I'd compare that piece of it to my free world experience in outpatient clinics,” McWhorter said. “It's not the fun part of the job, but it’s necessary and it's the information our patients deserve.

“There are opportunities in a normal outpatient environment where we see these prolonged periods of hard-to-find specialists or appointments that are just not available,” he said. “But we have a unique population for sure, and there are parameters that come with it.”

Chief among those parameters is security and coordinating that with the patient’s needs. Does the patient go on a normal transportation bus? Are there medical indicators that say he needs to be in a wheelchair van or special EMS transport? How many officers are required to accompany the patient?

 “It’s not just as simple as hop in the truck and take off to the appointment,” McWhorter said. “We need to coordinate with security movements, we need to coordinate with available vehicles, we need to coordinate with our partners. So, we have to be very creative. And a large portion of that is protecting the state of Texas and the community at large when we do that.”

But it’s also about what’s best for the patient—something McWhorter keeps top of mind.

McWhorter bristles at the notion that prison personnel only work in the system as a last resort. The opportunity to work with his team is one of the best things about his job, McWhorter said, noting their dedication and passion for the job.

“There is a very unique camaraderie in what we do,” McWhorter said. “Taking into account the measures you want to meet in your metrics and just doing a good job at the end of the day as a health care provider combined with security and the other aspects of it really develops strong bonds with teams.

“I could have a colleague that's 200 miles away, and we could sit and talk about the same issues and really get along immediately because it’s something that not all administrators or health care providers can relate to,” he said. “At the same time, we can talk to free world health care providers or outpatient providers because we do the same quality of care, the same type of care.”

McWhorter likens work in the prison system to mission work, and not necessarily the kind that automatically draws people in like work in third-world countries, orphanages or elderly populations. Ministering to “the dregs of society, as some would see it, the truly unwanted,” he said, is true mission work.

“And that brings us all together,” he said.

Working in the prison system allows for doing health care in a whole different way than in the free world. It’s rewarding, he said, and a pretty good trade-off—having to deal with security concerns rather than insurance companies.

But it’s still challenging. And while the staff in prisons is as different as the units where they work, one characteristic stands out to McWhorter as a key to success in working in Correctional Managed Care: open-mindedness and a willingness to learn.

“That’s the characteristic we all share,” he said.

McWhorter credits CMC leadership for engendering a culture of camaraderie and growth within the organization. And in addition to helping ensure patients get the best care possible, McWhorter said he would consider himself a success in his position if his leadership contributed to the leadership of tomorrow.

“When I look back at the end of my time with CMC and I'm ready to hang my hat up and take my boots off,” he said, “I'll define myself as successful if those people that I helped bring into this organization and helped grow and watched flourish  are the ones in leadership bringing us into a bright new day  in a whole new  era of health care, if I cannot see my mark but see their mark.”

As much of an advocate as McWhorter is for inmates and their health care, he is equally as much a supporter of his colleagues at UTMB. That led him to a spot on the UTMB Employee Advisory Council.

The EAC is a 15-member team that represents every walk of UTMB staff members—corrections, non-corrections, onsite, remote, on all shifts, etc.

“We encourage folks to reach out to us with ideas, with new thoughts or concepts with concerns, with issues, with complaints, things we've tried that they liked and didn't like,” he said, “so we can put that into one voice and mold it into a message that we can share with our leaders.

“It's very effective and gives our highest-level leaders some true perspective on the front line,” he added. “You know, when the boss is in the room, everyone acts a little bit differently. This gives us all the opportunity to be who we are and share the message we need to with the highest levels, and at the same time we have the opportunity to make sure that information flows all the way back from the highest levels into the community.”

McWhorter sees his own involvement in the EAC as similar to his role as a leader in CMC—to hear and to represent the voices of those without a voice, “to be the voice in the darkness for employees that elsewise wouldn't share their thoughts, wouldn't share their opinions.”

“That’s my goal there, to draw attention to those who need it and may have not had it before, not by any fault of the university but just because they didn't know they had a voice,” he said.

In addition to his role on the UTMB EAC, McWhorter also sits on the UT Systems Employee Advisory Council—the first CMC representative to do so, which he calls an honor and “the most humbling experience of my career.”

“I am in awe,” he said. “And I truly take great pride in it, and I thank our organization and the trust that they've placed in me with that. 

“And I do want to be a force to be reckoned with on behalf of UT Systems and UTMB and that council,” he said, “because our employees deserve it, our teams deserve it, our university deserves it.”

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