President’s Message

Continual Caring

The Delta variant of SARS CoV-2 has thrown all of us for a loop. It reminds us how much our hospitals – their leaders, caregivers, and support staff – are juggling while managing the greatest uptick in patient levels we’ve seen in months.

It humbles us to know just how much our fellow humans in the health care profession give to their communities every single day, often at the expense of their own health and wellbeing. So, I find that the AHA’s message, and my message, going into this second fall of the pandemic is one of profound caring.

To our brave and dedicated health care professionals: We see you. We appreciate you. We honor you. We care about the mental, physical, and emotional toll the pandemic is taking on you. Words cannot express how grateful we are to each of you for your daily compassion, care, expertise, and gifts of self.

The Delta variant ferociously shows us that receiving vaccination is, itself, a measure of caring. When people become vaccinated, they’re not just protecting themselves from COVID-19 and its most serious outcomes. They’re protecting their fellow Arkansans, their family members, their friends and coworkers, their children’s teachers, our health care workers, all of those with whom they come into contact in daily life. Vaccinated humans slow the spread of COVID-19, and they’re helping corral its ability to further mutate into more serious variants. That's why the AHA took a stand this summer on vaccine mandates for health care workers. Yes, even before President Joe Biden mandated that all health care workers become vaccinated, AHA supported a similar mandate. We encouraged our hospitals to urge every person in their employ to become vaccinated.

President Biden's vaccination mandate for the health care workforce affects all facilities that receive Medicare or Medicaid reimbursement. It is thought that requiring vaccinations in many U.S. workplaces will drastically slow the spread of COVID-19 and its Delta variant in our country.

The vaccine, proven safe through years of research pre-pandemic, offers caregivers an important layer of protection from the virus, and in many cases lowers their ability to spread it to their patients and family members. What better way to care for both caregivers and community?

Delta also brought the association to a difficult decision in late August, as we regretfully cancelled this year’s Annual Meeting. We know how much it means to hospital leaders, managers, and professionals to come together, learn from one another, learn from experts, share best practices, and simply increase professional networks at these annual gatherings. We also know that Delta’s spike during the wider pandemic makes it impossible to gather together, impossible for leaders to leave their individual hospitals, impossible to travel at this precarious time.

Caring for our hospitals, and for each of you serving them, led to our decision. We simply could not and would not convene when doing so could compromise our members’ health. We all hope that as more Arkansans become vaccinated and people continue to practice the public health measures that help stop the spread – especially masking and socially distancing – that we can come together once again in the fall of 2022.

In this issue of Arkansas Hospitals, we introduce tools that acknowledge and can help people cope with mental health challenges during this pandemic. We look at Long COVID and offer suggestions on ways to spot some of its syndromes. The issues we cover are solemn, we know. But we offer them for one reason – because we care so deeply for you and the work you do.

Bo Ryall

President and CEO Arkansas Hospital Association