By Pete Mercer

Within the last few years, healthcare workers have been through a lot. While it was already a difficult profession, COVID-19 pulled back the curtains on the frailties of the American healthcare supply chain, leaving many healthcare workers without the proper PPE in the initial days of the pandemic to protect themselves or the supplies to take care of their patients. 

If that weren’t enough, staffing shortages have stretched healthcare workers beyond their breaking point, creating hazardous working environments in an already difficult profession. The peaks and troughs of COVID waves add to a mounting pressure, causing more healthcare workers to leave the industry than ever before. While COVID isn’t quite the same challenge as it was a couple of years ago, it’s still lurking around the edges. Is there anything that can be done to remedy this situation? 

“The last two years have created stress shift overload and burnout among our nation’s healthcare workers, and we wanted to learn strategies that supply chain leaders used in several IDNs to reduce burnout and create a more enjoyable and safer workplace environment,” said John Pritchard, publisher, The Journal of Healthcare Contracting. 

In a recent webinar, JHC’s Pritchard discussed how IDNs are creating a happier, healthier and safer workplace environment with guests: 

• Cheryl Saxby, assistant vice president of specialty sourcing and caregiver engagement at St. Joseph Hospital
• Clinton Hazziez, vice president, supply chain and strategic sourcing at Baylor Scott & White
• John Horne, chief strategic sourcing officer at Bon Secours Mercy Health
• Ed Hisscock, senior vice president, supply chain at Trinity Health

Navigating the early days of the pandemic

No one had seen anything like this before. “Unprecedented times” was an apt, if overused, description of the chaos of the early days of the pandemic. While that chaos was not limited to a single industry, healthcare faced a unique set of challenges. 

Caregivers were hit hard and quickly by an onslaught of sick patients, coupled with a frustrating concoction of staff and supply shortages that made an already difficult line of work that much harder. Burnout quickly became a serious issue, as healthcare workers had to overcompensate for these shortages with overtime and upskilling in an environment that put them directly in contact with multitudes of sick patients. 

In the early days, people lined up on the streets in major cities during hospital shift changes, cheering for their local healthcare heroes. Apparel brands and other businesses offered discounts for healthcare workers, in a period of unity and support for those who have worked the frontlines of the industry for years. Integrated delivery networks (IDNs) were also looking for ways to ease the stress and burden of the early COVID days. 

“One of the strategies we’ve pushed forward is a colleague care team. We’ve selected some people and they come from all different walks of life. There are some change management experts, there are some folks that are from our HR team with various levels of expertise,” said Hisscock. “Basically, what we’re doing is we are taking colleagues offline. Their full-time role is to interview other colleagues on what’s going on, how they are feeling.”

Hisscock says that it may seem a little “touchy feely”, but the data they have collected from these interactions is invaluable, allowing Trinity Health to make the necessary tweaks to avoid further caregiver burnout in the future. 

Horne, of Bon Secours Health, said “We developed new recognition tools to recognize excellent care and  provision of excellent services. We developed spot bonuses where directors or department heads could provide spot bonuses for employees that were going above and beyond.” Bon Secours Health also implemented time-off opportunities for their employees, mass shipments of branded t-shirts or facemasks, and even a “no-meeting-Friday" once a month. 

Baylor Scott & White’s Clinton Hazziez stressed the importance of communication and leading with compassion. He said, “I think that IDN executives understood the importance of at least acknowledging the challenges that we were up against on the frontline. It was very important that there was an awareness and acknowledgment of the effort and sacrifice. From the top down, it was a conversation about being a compassionate leader and putting the people first.” 

Overcoming supply disruptions

One of the first – and still present – challenges of the pandemic was the disruption to the supply chain. While grocery stores couldn’t keep shelves stocked as consumers “panic purchased” seemingly innocuous items, hospitals faced a steeper challenge of stocking necessary PPE equipment and supplies to provide patient care. 

“This was a big deal because people were stressed out about the supply chain shortages,” said Cheryl Saxby of St. Joseph’s Hospital. “We had a nursing team collaboration that we pulled together to review the substituted back-order items. We reviewed those items, inspecting them to ensure they were up to standards before bringing them into our facility.”

Saxby’s team also included clinical people to ensure that the incoming products met the clinical standards they needed. “We also worked with some suppliers on allocations and identifying needs. Everyone was pushing and pulling, trying to get everything that they could get their hands on during that time, so we did pull some major suppliers together to work on that.”

St. Joseph’s also implemented a “stoplight tool” that notified all supply chain and frontline employees and the executives on what stock was running low, what they needed to do about it, and how they could reduce waste throughout the organization. 

At Baylor Scott & White, Hazziez and his team learned that the clinical requirements needed to be aligned with the product specifications so that they could more rapidly and efficiently source and procure the goods. 

He said, “I think we learned the importance of understanding clinical requirements and being able to establish those in a very matter-of-fact way, promoting more of a rapid sourcing environment. If we knew what the clinical requirements were, sourcing teams could go out and find those product specs that met those needs.”

The windows of opportunity were so rare, closing as quickly as they had opened. Armed with that intelligence, Hazziez and his team were able to take advantage of those opportunities, mitigating some of the disruptions for Baylor Scott & White. 

Knowing that the supply chain issues haven’t gone away, Hazziez is still stressing this mentality to his team, saying, “We have to be more disciplined about building more redundancy in our supply chain because things are flaring up on the manufacturing side, on the sourcing side, and on the logistics side. We have to bake in these redundancies so that our supply chain stays resilient.”

Forging a path ahead

Despite the challenges in the last couple of years, as well as the continued supply disruptions, how are IDNs faring in making the care setting a little happier, smoother, and less stressful? 

For Bons Secours Health, Horne says that it started with creating efficiencies in the distribution of the supplies they needed. By leveraging and collaborating with their prime MedSource distributor, they were able to hold pieces of 3PL inventory. "We could load our 3PL products on the rails and the trucks of the distributor and have that product delivered seamlessly like everything else.”

He continued, “It required far less stockpiling at the local level, and it created efficiencies in the distribution of that product.” They used a similar strategy to store COVID vaccines at the necessary temperature – for instance, Pfizer’s vaccine has to be refrigerated to an extremely cold temperature – working with their gas suppliers to get daily deliveries of dry ice in massive containers. Through this collaboration, they were able to keep the Pfizer vaccine cold and viable, creating a smoother delivery of vaccines to Bons Secours Health’s 60,000+ employees. 

At Trinity Health, Hisscock and his leadership team had an opportunity to get in on the action for themselves. With support staff at the hospitals dwindling, Trinity was filling those shifts with members of leadership from the corporate office and the ministries. 

Hisscock, speaking on this unique opportunity, said, “What that did was put us directly in service to the caregivers. It created a lot of opportunities for us to do what you do in rounding: listen, respond, and just demonstrate that you care.” He described that initiative as a powerful way for those in positions of leadership to get out of their comfort zones – corporate offices, cubicles, home offices etc. – and work with the frontline. He said, “They came back with a lot more compassion and recognition of just what these folks were going through.”

Saxby and her team took the opportunity to recognize and celebrate the hard work of the caregivers during this time. Every quarter, they hosted a Caregiver Connect session, where her team would sit down with the caregivers and discuss how they were doing and what St. Joseph’s could do to help.

“For the National Healthcare Supply Chain Week, we made that a bigger deal than we usually do. We wanted to make sure that caregivers have time to take breaks. We hosted games, gave out gifts, happy hours, and meals together where we could. Having those things was really helpful to take some of that stress out of their life during this time,” Saxby said.

Even with all the chaos happening during any given day, Hazziez understood that even the little things mattered to caregivers during this time period. “The simple things like ‘Can you guys keep up with the mask extenders?’ Because it made it more comfortable for nurses to wear the masks for extended hours.” He and his team developed utilization models that allocated certain products because clinicians needed them. 

Finding those small gestures went a long way to making life easier for caregivers. Hazziez said, “It was just the little things to make sure that were being attentive to the needs of the folks on the frontline.”

About the IDN Directory

The IDN Directory is the go-to resource for Health Care Suppliers who want the latest insights and information about the largest health systems in the U.S. and their supply chain leaders.

More than just a database, the IDN Directory's supply chain-focused content provides sales reps with a clear and comprehensive idea of their customers’ supply chain needs and activities, empowering them to achieve success with GPO, Direct, and Regional contracting. 

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