By Tracey Drury – Reporter, Buffalo Business First
Dec 30, 2022
From scaling back on scheduled procedures to staffing and stockpiling supplies, hospital leaders looked to their pandemic playbooks as well as lessons from past storms to navigate the recent blizzard.
“All of those experiences can be brought to bear,” said Don Boyd, Kaleida Health CEO. “There’s always things you can learn from each one of them.”
Lock in staffing
Both Kaleida and ECMC implemented mandated schedules that essentially kept staff in the hospitals for the duration of the storm. Boyd said the systems learned during the pandemic that continuity of care for patients was vital to keeping people well.
It was the first time he recalled an across the board staffing mandate in his 25 years with Kaleida.
“That’s the difference between an acute episode like this and Covid, where we you had the ability to have staff come and go,” he said.
At ECMC, that meant implementing Code Triage External Disaster, with employees heeding a call ahead of the storm for volunteers.
“While there was plenty of warning, we didn’t know the duration or how long the blizzard would be, so individuals were here for many days and understood that not only were people not going anywhere from the hospital, they weren’t going anywhere in the City of Buffalo and many places of Western New York,” Thomas Quatroche Jr., CEO at ECMC, said. “They understood that they were here until the storm was over, not knowing exactly how long that would be.”
Both executives also pointed to the importance of the community recognizing health care workers for their dedication and selflessness – something that was a major focus early on during the pandemic.
Stock up on supplies
Another lesson learned during Covid: It pays to overstock supplies, including both food and PPE, whenever possible – despite the cost. Kaleida started bringing in extra food, linens and other supplies a week prior to the storm, contrary to the trend in health care for just-in-time deliveries.Quatroche said ECMC was also able to get enough supplies for four to five days.
“One of the lessons we’re going to learn is that we need to stockpile more, but it’s a challenge because obviously we have to have storage for those things and there’s a financial cost to doing that,” he said. “That’s a real challenge not only for ECMC, but for the whole county and other health care and emergency services institutions.”
Leaders also said they learned during the pandemic to track and categorize everything, including excess expenses and dollars lost due to canceled or postponed procedures to make it easier to pursue remuneration if state or federal dollars are made available.
Flexibility is key
Though it was challenging to deal with the blizzard during Christmas, that timing was also helpful since both health care systems already had a lighter load of scheduled surgeries and procedures this week. That means fewer procedures canceled and fewer dollars lost.
During the pandemic, procedures and surgeries were put on hold by the state to ensure capacity for Covid patients. As schedules return to normal, those lessons come into play, which means assessing which cases are more urgent or emergent.
Hospitals were also able to pivot back to telemedicine and alternate ways to provide care to patients.
“Again, we’re back to lessons learned during Covid,” Boyd said. “A lot of those were things that we have reinitiated so that we could assure patients had access to care.”