Holyoke Medical’s caring team pulls through all challenges

With a “happy new year” still ringing in our ears, we have entered 2023. The hard work of making it a “happy” and “successful” year begins, on an individual level, with all those New Year’s resolutions, as well as on an organization level, navigating the difficult financial channels of a recession.

Many businesses were hit extremely hard by the lockdowns and restrictions imposed during the pandemic. Our thoughts go out to the many small businesses that did not survive the lockdowns. Health care was no exception to the ill economic effects, even if it was for slightly different reasons. Less routine care was delivered, resulting in less revenue; more expenses were occurred for personal protective equipment and other pandemic-re- lated supplies; and the new challenge, less available staff, resulting in a huge increase in labor cost. Add to that the galloping inflation and the recession we entered in 2022, and 2023 sure looks like it will be a challenging year.

Allow me, though, before I get to my thoughts on how to meet the challenges in 2023, to say that the health care industry, by and large, received a significant level of financial support from the federal government, and here in Massachusetts, from the state government as well, and for that we are enormously grateful.

That said, the challenges are not over, and we will look to our state government and legislature to continue supporting the health care sector, especially the smaller independent community hospitals and their affiliates. As a safety net provider, it is vitally important to be able to continue to provide the services we offer to our community.

But we also have to turn to our own abilities to manage difficult situations and find strength within our organization to overcome the challenges ahead. Here at Holyoke Medical Center and our affiliates, we started this work many years ago, ramped it up in 2021 and 2022, and will certainly carry it forward into 2023 and beyond.

All challenges can be met with greater success by an organization that has engaged and dedicated employees. And in order to have engaged and dedicated employees an organization has to care for them, in good times and in bad, in meaningful ways, treating them respectfully and with honesty. This has been our recipe for success, and we think it is the recipe for weathering the recession and beyond.

How do we care for those most in need of support? Do we give employees opportunity for growth and development? Are we a fair employer? Do we listen to the needs of all our employees, and do we respond appropriately? Do we respect their choices, or do we impose our will on them?

I will not list all of the many ways we do that because I have in previous years written extensively about our minimum wage policies, our tuition reimbursement, our no-layoff policy, our respect for individual choice and more. While many of these things are worth repeating, I will focus instead on a few new things we are doing to support our employees:

• This winter we are providing additional financial assistance to our lower income level employees to help them with the increased cost of heating and food;

• We have created a stateof-the-art meditation room and exercise gym for our staff to help them decompress from the stressors at work;