President’s Message

The Journey Continues

Arkansas: Summer of 2021. This looks and feels like a different world than the one we lived in a year ago. Maybe it’s just that we’re different ourselves. COVID-19 has changed everyone and the way we look at everything.

Today, we’re vaccinating; in the summer of 2020 we were bracing for the pandemic fight of our lives. Today, we’re diagnosing viral variants; a year ago we struggled to understand and manage an unknown and highly transmissible disease.

In this issue of Arkansas Hospitals, we look back over the past year and a half as we begin to venture past COVID-19. We focus on what pandemics can teach us and how to move beyond them.

I’m incredibly proud of Arkansas’s hospitals and how each has adapted over the last 18 months. Each is different, and each community faced challenges of its own. Exhausting, perilous, frightening, precarious… the journey has been each of these and more. And yet … and yet … the number of lives saved, situations met head-on, hands held, patients healed … the simple amount of loving care delivered is astounding.

Some hospitals set up childcare centers so their staff members could work. Some found ways to keep staff members and their families fed when store shelves emptied. Some innovated ways to test for COVID-19 when tests were hard to get. Some expanded care capabilities by creating patient wards from workrooms and storerooms. Whatever it took to meet the needs, that’s what was done.

In thinking back over our COVID-19 journey, I’m amazed at the obstacles we’ve not only encountered, but met and solved together: • We procured PPE when it seemed there was none to be had. • We increased testing capacity when backlogs mounted. • We found ways to purchase ventilators and other necessary equipment as hospitalizations soared. • We converted rooms with normal ventilation to negative pressure facilities in record time. • We managed financial pressures that were in constant flux. • We found ways to acquire additional staff where needed and to hang on to our own valuable staff where possible. • We increased ICU bed capacity, finding beds for people in the next town if we had to. • We developed vaccination strategies while still managing patients sick with the virus.

One of the most important lessons this pandemic has taught us is that we can accomplish almost anything if we move forward together.

And now we begin the transition to a world profoundly changed by the COVID-19 pandemic. One day at a time, one challenge at a time, but always together. Thank you to each of you for your inspiring work. It’s an honor to go with you on this journey.

Bo Ryall

President and CEO Arkansas Hospital Association