We’re the only not-for-profit healthcare in our area, and also the largest healthcare provider. We had a unique scenario of community and staff coming together. We had some really difficult times during the original two weeks [of the pandemic] to flatten the curve and have hospitals prepare, and our Senior Leadership Team said, “Let’s really prepare. Let’s do this,” because we didn’t know what [COVID] was. We built a hospital and alternative care site in our parking garage to house up to 1500 beds, and we did that in 10 days. It was a pretty phenomenal piece, and thankfully, we didn’t really have to use it but we did take seriously our part in the community to be prepared. I’ll tell you, it was everybody helping; whether you were a clinician, or you were HR etc, you were putting cots out and you were rolling out PPE for everybody.

The pandemic taught us that we can be much nimbler, and that we need to be innovative in our approach. Yes, there are different licenses and different certifications for scope of work, but you can cross some of these things and really do a more collaborative opportunity with staff.

For example, we had HR people that were becoming Care Aides, and we had IT people who were delivering food! Everybody did whatever they could to try and help the frontline clinicians.

…It’s still work in progress, but I think healthcare is going to be better for it.

There’s a greater appreciation of each other’s roles on both ends; for example, both from the clinicians understanding the back-of-house support services, and support services understanding more about the clinician’s roles. At the end of the day, the people we care for are our families and our community. It could very easily be my own mother or father in that bed, and knowing that we have a team to wrap them in whatever services they need is pretty powerful no matter the lens, and that’s why you work here.

I remember the story of a housekeeper who touched my heart years ago, who would say that the most important thing for her was how she cleaned a room. I would ask her, “What does that mean for you?” to which she’d reply, “I sometimes use 20 mops for one room because that room could be my family member. Anyone who comes in is family and our community, so that room has to be clean.” Similarly, I remember a laboratory team member telling me that when they look at a specimen, that it’s not just a Petri dish of a growing cell. That specimen is a patient.

I can’t help but think about how these moments are just so eye-opening for me.

I’ve had a few career conversations with people where I’m simply talking to them about the world of possibilities and what they can do, and how to take the steps to get there. Afterwards, they’ve gotten there and then come back saying, “I wouldn’t have done this if you didn’t talk to me about it.” Who knew that we could have those impacts!

I think of a moment when I have an employee who has left me to go onto bigger, better things. I feel like I did my job because we want them to grow, whether it’s within the organization, ideally, but sometimes you don’t have that opportunity for them! You want them to grow.

Then, you receive a letter months later from that person saying, “You don’t know what a difference you’ve made in my life. I wouldn’t have been here had you not coached me and mentored me to get to this point.” That’s a moment.

It didn’t need to be lights and camera. It just needed to be a simple, ‘Thank You.’

During the pandemic, you have to financially pivot as well. You have to do some creative things to make change, and we had decided on a particular area within our organization that we weren’t going to maintain: our warehouse area.

At first thought, our warehouse team workers would have said, “I’m a warehouse worker. That’s what I do.” Instead, we were able to successfully ask them, “What do you want to do?” In one case, we had one warehouse team member who we trained to become a pharmacy tech and they would have never thought that that was their avenue.

We enrolled another warehouse team member in our ‘Coding University’ because they liked doing that kind of detailed-thinking work! So, [career growth] is not even just on the traditional clinical end, but in all ends of the organization.

We do a high-potential program where staff-level folks are nominated from across the organization from every discipline, to participate in shadowing other departments, as well doing a lot of self-reflection and understanding communication styles. It’s very collaborative, and ultimately you need to be vulnerable! We have clinicians, pharmacists, nurses, cooks, a security guard (just to mention a few disciplines!) but because they had to work so closely together for those six months, they found each other in this process. It’s a really cool journey! And again, somewhat unintended, we’re trying to build them to their highest potential. At the end of each 6-month program, there is a graduation ceremony. It’s kind of an interesting dynamic, and it’s always such an amazing event. At our latest graduation, we had one security guard. We make our graduates do a small speech, which is very intimidating, but every time they do it you hear the most amazing things and they grow tremendously.

The security guard came, and had brought his daughter and mother with him, and he gave a speech about renounced security. For background, Purple is our organization’s color. When speaking on his security team, he said, “They are Purple Knights. They are my Purple Knights.” He went on to tell the story of how one of the Purple Knights died of COVID during the height of the pandemic. It was very heart-wrenching, with not a dry eye in the audience.

But then his four year-old daughter stood up on a chair and she said, “Yay, Daddy!” And it was just the coolest thing ever.