Healthcare leaders told The Bee that they are confronting a level of disruption to delivering care and running their businesses that they have never seen in their careers as a result of the California wildfires and Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s planned blackouts.
“I actually have never experienced a power outage where we were on emergency generator backup for 40 hours or more,” said Dr. Brian Evans, the chief executive officer at Sierra Nevada Memorial Hospital in Grass Valley. “We’ve had short-term disruptions, but typically it wasn’t one of these planned outages that lasted for quite some time. I would say, for me personally, it’s been a career first.”
While people can readily understand the logistical difficulty of evacuating and then re-opening a hospital or other types of health care facilities, said Theresa Frei, the CEO of the Sutter Valley Medical Foundation, what often goes unnoticed is the impact the wildfires and the closures have on patients and providers. The stress of the Kincade Fire, coming two years after the Tubbs Fire, has taken a toll, she said.
“We set up an employee assistance program out of our call center in Utah. We have been having our employees call for assistance,” Frei said. “We give short-term loans, but most of all, they’ve been calling for counseling. This is a very difficult thing for them to go through again, so we put that system in place right away and made our employees aware of that.”
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