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Scott Kelley: Hello. My name is Scott Kelley, and I'm the Director of Mission Integration at Loyola University Medical Center. I'm here with Elizabeth Early, who is the Regional VP of Professional and Support Services and the Interim President of Gottlieb Hospital for Loyola Medicine. Welcome, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Early: Thank you

Scott Kelley: Can you tell us a little bit about your professional journey and your current responsibilities?

Elizabeth Early: It's a long story, Scott. But I will stick to the highlights. I have a bachelor's degree In psychology. I then went on to pursue a master's in health administration at the Ohio State University. from there, I did a postgraduate fellowship here in Chicago at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and never looked back from that point.

I've always wanted to work in hospitals. And I would say that my current responsibility is a mouthful. As you said, that the Vice President of Professional and support services for all three of our hospitals, which includes our pharmacy, lab, radiology, as well as our environmental services, food service, security facilities. So it's the dream I've always wanted, the job I've always And I'm also then serving as the interim president of Gottlieb Memorial Hospital. Our president retired in the midst of the pandemic and so I've been sitting in his chair for a while.

Scott Kelley: So you said you knew her early on that you wanted to get into hospital work. Do you remember something that sort of drew you to it that said, "Wow, this is something I want to pursue"?

Elizabeth Early: Well, my mom recently retired after 43 years as an operating room nurse at the same hospital. She worked at a university hospital in Cincinnati for her entire career. So I tell people I grew up in the OR visiting my mom. And my first job was a unit secretary at her hospital on the second shift. So I've just always loved the feel and even the smell of hospitals. So it's just where I feel very comfortable.

Scott Kelley: So thinking about the last year, you know, the pandemic is just really a unique time. I think that kind of goes without saying. But I'm really interested in your perspective as a senior leader in this time. And many of the images that I think come to mind when we talk about healthcare heroes are of physicians and nurses. And I keep saying that's only part of the overall portrait. So I'm wondering if you could share a couple of examples of all of the support services that go into the work that clinicians do on a daily basis.

Elizabeth Early: Yeah. I'm always happy to talk about our teams. I think that while I do believe that nurses bore the brunt and continue to bear the brunt as the primary caregiver for all of these patients, they have a lot of support from our professional and support services team. So a couple of quick examples, the pharmacy and a lot of my departments are in the basement and behind the scenes, but our pharmacy team, because these COVID patients were so sick and we were dealing with a disease that we didn't really know how to treat, they were making hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of bags of medication, of drips that these patients were on and their workload increased significantly, just to help take care of these patients.

But in addition to that, we were struggling with shortages of paralytics, shortages of different drugs. So we were sourcing things, inhalers. There was a constant sourcing that was going on in the pharmacy to make sure that we had what we needed. And then they also took the lead in the pharmacy once the vaccine was available, it starting up the vaccine clinic. So the pharmacy is one department that you know exists, but don't hear about as much. And I know they've really been extremely busy through this.

The other of my departments in the basement is the lab, truly the unsung heroes. In the first weeks, months of the pandemic, we didn't have a test. And we were desperate to know who was positive and negative. And the lab worked, you know, with our vendors. We, not only brought online three different pieces of equipment in our labs and did all of the validation to be able to provide a positive or negative result within-- it got down to about a one-hour timeframe by the time we were really getting good and had a lot of equipment and they also were managing supplies and stockouts and stockpiling swabs so that we could do the tests. So they truly were heroes in the development of the test on multiple different platforms and multiple different modalities throughout the course of this. And I think the last count was we've done over 500,000 COVID tests since the beginning here in our lab.

And then the last one, our environmental services team. They are truly the unsung heroes and truly did have to learn a lot about the environment and what COVID meant. We spent a lot of time with our environmental services team training them. We had our infectious disease doctors going to their staff meetings and talking to them about protocols, which were constantly changing, and PPE and all of the things that they needed to do to be able to safely take care of our emergency department and our inpatient units with COVID patients in them.

So those are just a couple examples of how our support services and professional services teams really participated in the pandemic. pandemic

Scott Kelley: And when I think of hospital operations, I think of flow, you know, the flow of equipment and patients, and this flow has to keep moving constantly, discharges. So what were some of the challenges that sort of prevented us from maintaining that flow, that throughput, that we had prior to the pandemic?

Elizabeth Early: I think in the beginning, really environmental services, we spent a lot of time and energy on knowing what the number of air exchanges we needed to make sure that a room was safe, because we just didn't know how long the virus lived on surfaces and in the air. for example, in the emergency department, when we had a patient come in, who we suspected had COVID, when they left that room, we kept that room closed for 90 minutes, waiting for the air in that room to exchange the appropriate number of times so that it was safe for an environmental services employee to go into that room.

So, you know, in the height of it, we had an emergency department full of, COVID suspected patients. And therefore, we were very crunched for space because we were waiting the 90 minutes for the air exchanges before we could bring the next patient in. And the same thing with inpatient units, if we discharged a COVID patient, we waited 90 minutes before we cleaned the room. And we really needed all those rooms to be ready as quickly as possible given the load of patients that we had.

Scott Kelley: And so learning how to do those things, I mean, here's a new virus and understanding Adding how it behaves and what safety protocols there are, so there's a learning curve with that. But as you reflect back on the last year, what have you learned about yourself as a leader, about our work at Loyola Medicine or about healthcare?

Elizabeth Early: I think we've all learned a lot. I think that I personally learned how resilient people really can be. And I think sometimes we overuse that word. But yeah. we just kept coming back every single day, the nurses, the doctors, the environmental services workers kept coming to work. And it wasn't really a choice. That was our calling, that was our job, and that's why we were in this business is what we kept saying. But to really see it day in and day out and how exhausted everyone was and how we just kept going, because the patients just kept coming. So I feel like that is what I learned.

And I think healthcare, you know, we've all learned a lot of lessons about healthcare even from the way we treat COVID patients. You know, in the beginning, if you were diagnosed with COVID in the early stages, you would have been treated differently than you are today, just in the way that we manage oxygen and the medications that we use. So to be able to learn about a virus and how to treat it while we were treating it over the course of the year is pretty impressive from what science is capable of and our teams. So, in hindsight, it's been a very interesting thing to look back and watch how far we've come.

But I also would say my also learning is that in healthcare, we have a long way to go in being able to contain and control and treat and reach all of our community with either testing or the vaccine. We've learned a lot, but we definitely have a long way to go.

Scott Kelley: So we talk about being a mission-driven organization that lives out or tries to live our values on a daily basis. Do you see examples of that in your areas?

Elizabeth Early: Every day. I mean, I think that the care and the compassion that you see from every single employee towards each other, towards the patients, towards their families, towards their community at large, I know that we all were called to or have to answer to. Our families all had a million questions about what was it like, what is safe, what's not safe. And at every level of the organization, talking about how we were the essential workers. We are the essential workers who had to come and take care of these patients and tell our stories and encourage our friends and families to stay safe and really appreciate how serious this pandemic was.

Scott Kelley: as I think about the last year, one thing I learned from the chaplains, they talk about grief and gratitude as two ways to sort of make meaning of a very difficult and challenging time. Does that resonate with you? Are there things that really highlight that the grief and the gratitude of our experience over the last year?

Elizabeth Early: Definitely. You know, I think back to the early days and working in our incident command center, you know, we work 12-hour shifts and we had up on the board the names of all of our COVID patients, you know, their last name in the bed. And we, we were ground zero for what beds were open, what was available. And we also heard of the patients who passed away. there was always a quiet reverence in the room, not only for that patient, but for their family that couldn't be there with them, for the nurse who was there taking care of them. And just that that loss of that person hit every single person all the way down to incident command with the enormity of it.

But at the same time, we started to really look at when we were extubating a COVID patient and they were getting better. And then when they were going home, we we started playing a song on the overhead speaker about Here Comes The Sun song when a COVID patient went home. And so anywhere you were throughout the hospital, you would know that someone was going home, someone got better.

And so I think the enormity of it, really when I think about those quiet times in incident command, when we were watching the board and seeing who was coming in through the emergency department and how people were leaving the hospital was extremely, both grief and gratitude. Yeah, very impactful.

Scott Kelley: I don't think I'll ever think of that song in the same way. I mean, I've only heard it a couple of times outside of work, but it's just pretty incredible that we take that moment to recognize the significance of the work that's happening and what it means to patients who have recovered from COVID and are able to go home.

So, if you could change one thing to improve healthcare delivery, if you have a magic wand, what would it be that you would change?

Elizabeth Early: Oh, it would need to be a fairly big magic wand. I think something that I see and through the pandemic, but also just through even before is the inequity of healthcare delivery in our country and throughout our communities and how something like the pandemic struck different people harder than others and how getting the resources that we need to the communities and to get people to trust us is something that I would love to be able to change that we could be seen as the trusted resource for everyone in our community.

And I think that there's definitely a disparity there. We've come a long way, but I think we have a long way to go. We can see that in our vaccine numbers and people who are choosing not to get the vaccine. So that'd be a pretty big magic wand.

Scott Kelley: So, thank you so much for sharing sharing your experience with us, looking back kind of retrospectively over the last year. Are there any final thoughts you'd like to share with our listeners? So the premise of the podcast is thinking about our values as not just sort of words on the wall, but things that really do drive kind of how we think about our work and how we do our work on a regular basis.

Elizabeth Early: I think that our values are part of who we all are each and every day, even if we're not saying those words. So I think the one that I always look to is the commitment to those who are poor. And poor does not just mean financially. It means to people who are vulnerable or all of our patients that couldn't have their families visit them.

And think the compassion that every single person in our hospital shows, showed and continues to show to our patients and their families is the most important thing. And so will always be proud of the work that we did and we continue to do for our patients in the most unprecedented experience that we could ever have imagined in our worst nightmares. So am very proud of the commitment that we had to our patients and their families. Thank you.

Scott Kelley: Thank you, Elizabeth. I really appreciate your work and your insight and being with us today.

Elizabeth Early: Thanks so much. Have a good day.