NURSES MONTH
The Gold
Standard Ocala Hospital nursing unit captures top award in the midst of raging pandemic BY BRAD ROGERS | PHOTOGRAPHY BY RALPH DEMILIO
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s she talks about what her intensive care nursing unit at HCA Florida Ocala Hospital has had to endure over the past couple of years, Andrea Hunter wavers between beaming smiles of pride and tearful pauses of grief. “When Delta hit last year, I don’t have the words to describe how horrible it was,” said Hunter, a mother of six and the clinical nursing manager of Ocala Hospital’s Trauma Intensive Care Unit. “If you compare it to the first wave (of the COVID-19 pandemic), multiply it 10 times. And it was people you saw at the grocery store. I had hard-core trauma nurses and I was holding them. “To give you a scale, in an average month, we’ll have 20 to 30 deaths. Most of them are anticipated deaths. They’re very ill, it’s expected. Then in September 2021, we had 132 people die. And these were people in their 30s and 40s and 50s. These are young people and they’re dying.”
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| MAY 2022 | OCALAMAGAZINE.COM
Despite the large numbers of deaths brought on by COVID-19 – especially the Delta variant – and the horrors it inflicted on the patients, their families and those who cared for them, Ocala Hospital (formerly Ocala Regional Medical Center), recently won the gold-level Beacon Award for Excellence from the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN). It is the highest award in the nursing profession and marked the first time a hospital in the 185-hospital HCA chain, the largest hospital company in the United States, has ever captured the gold Beacon Award, which also hands out silver and bronze awards. The award is based on six “pillars” of nursing care, including leadership structures, adequate staffing and staff engagement, effective learning and development, evidence-based practices and processes, and outcome measurement. Richard Rivera, assistant nursing officer at Ocala Health, said the gold-level award –
one of only 45 given across the nation and one of only two in Florida this year – is particularly impressive given the pressures being felt in the nursing profession during the pandemic. Not only is there a national nursing shortage, but COVID presented unique challenges because it was new and ever-changing. “The nursing shortage – it’s here,” Rivera said. “The shortage is not a surprise. But the pandemic just added a layer to the complexity of the problem.” And the level of emotional toll it took on health care workers had never been experienced before on such a sweeping scale. “It was a war zone,” Rivera said. “There’s no better way to describe it.” “No one likes to deal with death,” he added. “End of life is the most challenging piece of critical care. … But the sheer number and frequency of the deaths made it much more difficult.” Rivera said he has had “a lot of training for mass casualty events, but there’s no training
