HHD staff rallies with BRIGHT IDEAS campaign to find solutions

It's a familiar story around Colorado and the country, businesses reducing services or closing doors all together, employees cutting back to a 50 percent workforce and essential businesses trying to stay in business with reduced foot traffic, sales and revenues. Haxtun Hospital District, along with the entire healthcare industry, finds itself caught in the same scenario, except for needing to remain open and viable to take care of those whose health has been compromised by the virus itself.

While many healthcare facilities are doing just that, overrun with COVID-19 patients, risking the health and well-being of their own staff and wondering if additional PPE will show up, it's a different battle for hospitals like Haxtun Hospital District. Community members are justifiably isolating themselves, which reduces the amount of economic activity that takes place in a community. For healthcare facilities, the downturn of revenue-generating services makes it extremely difficult to purchase supplies, maintain payroll and keep doors open. Many rural hospitals across the country are having to layoff and furlough staff or close their doors all together.

Haxtun Hospital District has taken an aggressive, team-based, approach to avoid being in that situation, starting early in its fight to maintain employees, personal protective equipment and high-quality services. HHD has been able to avoid eliminating any positions. All HHD staff members have been invited to participate in a BRIGHT IDEAS campaign, which allows employees the chance to submit any and all ideas that could help HHD.

"Everyone is pitching in to help. We have employees who aren't involved in direct patient care that are volunteering to take some time off, we have some employees who are picking up shifts in other departments that are extremely busy. It makes a big difference, and it's working," said Ricci Dreier, Director of Human Resource at HHD.

The Haxtun Hospital District finance team has also been working in high gear to secure any and all available relief funds.

"There is a lot of paperwork, tracking and documents to sort through, but going through this is worth it for our community. We are lucky to have Points West Community Bank to help us navigate the intricacies of the stimulus packages and the CARES funding for our hospital," Joleen Stroyek, Chief Financial Officer at HHD said.

Although reducing costs is important, HHD recognizes that having access to healthcare services is also important.

"We have people who need care for things that are not related to this pandemic. In some cases, it's a matter of life and death. We take every precaution to keep everyone in our facility safe. Those on our patient care team are experts in infection control, pandemic or no pandemic, this is what they deal with every day," said Julia Biesemeier, HHD Director of Marketing. "If a community member needs services, we don't want them to be scared to come to our facility. We want them to get the care they need."

Community steps up to help HHD

Across the country, personal protective equipment is hard to come by. HHD closely monitors their supply of PPE on a daily basis and is continually working at securing more every day. A homemade mask campaign led by Jeri Soens and a group of local seamstresses has made a big impact on supplying masks to community members as well as HHD employees who are not in direct patient care.

"Many hours, yards of fabric and elastic, have allowed us to conserve our PPE for our care team," said Biesemeier.

Mark and Dottie Oman, owners of Prairie IT, have been able to utilize their own supply chain to procure additional surgical masks for the hospital.

"Because HHD doesn't have any positive cases of COVID-19, procuring masks for every-day use through healthcare suppliers is nearly impossible. Having a local company with access to masks has helped immensely," Biesemeier added.

Seaboard Farms and Save the Site have also stepped up by supplying masks to the hospital.