HJAR Mar/Apr 2022

DIALOGUE 10 MAR / APR 2022 I  HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF ARKANSAS   Dianne Hartley, Editor Thank you, Troy, for the mind space today. How are you, and what is the condition of your team? Troy Wells Thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk with you. I’m doing fine. It’s been a long last couple of years for all of us in the industry, myself included. It’s almost to a point where the fluctua- tions related to COVID and our operational rhythm related to COVID have become almost normal for us. I think the challenge that I’ll face, as will all of our healthcare staff face, coming out of COVID, whenever that may be, is — we talked about a new normal a year ago — now we’re in a different kind of normal, and we’re almost going to have to adjust to another new normal. Our staff, I think, are going to view things slightly differently. I think our leadership will view things slightly differently in terms of pri- orities and what’s really important for the healthcare industry, depending upon which part of the industry you’re in. As far as my team is concerned, they have been resilient. With each wave we have experienced, they have been professional, compassionate and responsive to the needs of our patients and the community. I am very proud of all of them. I know that from a hospital perspective, a lot of the things that were so strategically important to us pre-pandemic, for a while, got set to the side. Those of us in the hospital side, and maybe in the physician side, were really trying to do new things — to expand some of the things we did, integrate new technology, form strategic partnerships. A lot of those things were strategically impor- tant and still are, but a lot of those got set to the side when we got back to the core of what we really do and that’s take care of really sick people. I think at our organiza- tion, and in the hospital industry in general, we’ll start to see more of those things filter back into our radar stream and become pri- orities again —not that people have aban- doned everything during this period of time, but the priorities have shifted. We may see some of those things come back up to the top of the list in terms of what we’re focused on from a leadership perspective, go back to more of the long-term viewwhere we’ve been really focused on the near-term, our community, the needs that exist for patients, not just with COVID, but with other diseases that we’ve had to take care of during this time. We’ve focused so much on our people. This is probably the best part of the pan- demic and also the biggest challenge. We focus on our workforce, everybody in the industry. We absolutely have had to do that, and we should do that all the time. We try to do that all the time, but there are so many competing priorities, and this has refocused, I think, every healthcare organization on the people that deliver care and what we need to do to better take care of them, to make their work more valuable to themselves and to the organization — to re-instill a sense of pride of being in the healthcare field and to really connect meaning with what they do in their jobs. Because it’s been so chaotic the last few years, and we talk all the time about the mental health and mental well-being of our workforce, we’ve got to continue to focus on that as we come out of this. Editor As the leader of Arkansas’s largest healthcare system, what are the five most important things on your radar screen right now? Wells In no particular order, I will start with probably the most important, and that is, as I just mentioned, the healthcare workforce and how we rebound. It’s funny, I started in about 1995 or 1996 in healthcare. I think I was in graduate school in ‘95, and we were talking about this workforce shortage back then, and every other year there are new projections about how many tens of thou- sands of nurses short we’re going to be in the United States by 2020-whatever. And here we are. Certainly, COVID has exacer- bated the situation, but the situation existed before. We’ve never had adequate staffing in healthcare, at least not in Arkansas, and I suspect nationally that’s generally been the case. We now have a situation where every industry is short of workers, and I think the risk is that we, collectively, the public, might start to think about healthcare no differently than any other industry that’s short of work- ers right now. The reality is, we’ve been on a very dangerous path in terms of supply of healthcare workers for a long time, particu- larly nurses. And now we see the situation that we’re in today and how bad it is. In my estimation, it is not necessarily fromCOVID. Nurses didn’t just disappear. Surely some retired; some may have said, “You know, I don’t like this COVID situation. I’m not going to work in a hospital anymore”; but for the vast majority, that’s not what hap- pened. We’ve had this national revolving door of traveling nurses, for example, that have disrupted the normal workplace or what we knew as normal before. How long it takes us to get out of that, I think is a sig- nificant question. I don’t know the answer to it, but it’s not going to be quick. With every surge of COVID, you’ve had clinicians rush to one place across the coun- try, to another, and back again. And, when everybody’s short, it’s going to go from the COVID surge wave of movement to a poten- tially economically driven wave of move- ment because nobody’s got enough. It could take quite some time for us to get out of this situation, at least stabilize. We’re still going to be short at the other side of it, but at least to stabilize the workforce where we don’t have so much constant turnover and peo- ple coming and going, people hopefully will settle at some point. Editor Thank you. That was one. Wells Another big one I mentioned in my opening comment was just mental health- care in the United States in general. In Arkansas particularly, we rank low or high depending on how you look at it in terms