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Julie Carter: Hello. My name is Julie Carter and I serve Trinity Health as Vice-president for Mission Services at St. Mary's Healthcare System in Athens, Georgia. And today, I am talking with Montez Carter, our Chief Executive Officer at St. Mary's. Montez, would you like to introduce yourself?

Montez Carter: Yes. And Thank you for having me, Julie. My name is Montez Carter, and I currently serve as president and CEO of St. Mary's Healthcare System. I'm based out of Athens, Georgia, and I have been with this ministry for about 11 years.

Julie Carter: And how did you end up here in Athens? I think you've had a little bit of a pathway here.

Montez Carter: I did. So I began my healthcare career as a clinical pharmacist.

And then, back in about 2007, went into hospital administration where, after spending a few years for looking for different opportunities, St. Mary's came up and was a great opportunity to be a part of a faith-based healthcare system as well as to come to Athens, to raise a family in a great community.

Julie Carter: As we sit here today, I'm thinking about, not that long ago, just a couple months ago at St. Mary's, we commemorated the one year anniversary of the World Health Organization declaring COVID-19 a global pandemic.

And at that time, we recognize the 1,483 people that we cared for who had suffered from COVID-19. So thinking about this past year or more actually, I know that you leading this organization have had a lot of different experiences coping with these challenges. And I was wondering if you would share some stories about that this past year.

Montez Carter: You know, it's interesting because there are just so many things to think about over really what's transpired over the past year. And there's been just such a wide sense of emotions that I think that all of us felt in terms of the shock in terms of the pandemic that was unfolding right before our eyes, not having anything like this that any of us had dealt with before in our careers and just the uncertainty, the fear that came along with it.

And then as we began to learn more and to hear of the pandemic and the spread and all of the individuals being impacted by that, about how we began to really think about changing our business in terms of keeping our patients safe, keeping our colleagues safe, things that we needed to do to slow the spread of the disease,

How our caregivers, whether it was our nurses, respiratory therapists, physicians, chaplains that were working to be the bridges between some of those patients that were being impacted to make sure that they were not being alone.

And also just the wanting to know by the family members and keeping in contact with them about what was going on and how they through things like telemedicine could be able to have a set of eyes on their loved ones. And so as we're going through that, we're also we're thinking about how to deliver care in a way, given the set of circumstances. So things that we had talked about as a healthcare system for quite some time, such as telemedicine, it was within a period of a couple of weeks, that we were really able to pull together, to think differently, to have all hands on deck, to be able to really transform the way that we were delivering healthcare services to some of our populations.

And I do think that just the bravery and heroism that was being shown by our colleagues that were truly as a lot of other parts of our economy and of our society were shutting down, our colleagues at the bedside and those caregivers and all of those, such as our supply chain leaders, that we're making sure that our staff were being safe and provided with the equipment and resources that they needed, they were showing up every day and kept showing up and knowing that they were in some instances, putting themselves in harm's way and even going back home to their families. And, you know, so it's just so many memories to think about in terms of what happened and just all of the acts that occurred during that time for us to keep our society and our patients cared for.

Julie Carter: Yeah, thank you. It really is kind of a mosaic of events and memories and emotions. You touched on so many points. But I think one of the themes was fear and uncertainty. Fear about if and when a surge would hit and would we be prepared? And what do we understand about this disease? And yet people still showing up and responding, I think is a powerful testament to our colleagues and their commitment to the patients we're serving and the communities we're serving.

I think we're all relieved at this moment that there's hope on the horizon. We are, looking at a time when we have a very or several very effective vaccines and we've worked really hard getting those vaccines to our colleagues and our community. So now, at this point, having looked back on the past year, what are your thoughts looking forward? Where do you see some of the challenges and maybe some of the hope as well?

Montez Carter: With the hope, I think part of the hope going forward is that there will be things that we learned during this past year in terms of how to assemble and come together and to have systems to be able to properly communicate, share resources, to share best practices and advancements of rapidly evolving proportions that we've not seen from a medical perspective and how to be able to take that and be more effective and more responsive.

And so I definitely have a hope that everything that we've gone through will be evaluated and learned from so that, if we are faced with something into the future, whether it be a pandemic or some other type of global crisis, that we're able to respond in a better way to save more people.

I think that from a vaccine standpoint, just as you say it, there was so much hope and anticipation of vaccines. And when we were able to have them rolled out, there was so much demand from the healthcare providers that wanted to be protected, to our law enforcement and other vital people in our economy and our at-risk populations, such as our elderly.

Our hope and effort is to make sure that we're continuing our momentum for those who have not been fully vaccinated to consider doing so. Because we fearful that, if we do not do our part and allow the mutation to continue to occur a variance, that we could find ourselves back in an undesirable place. So I think that the concern is that we don't keep up our guards and that we don't take our foot off the gas in terms of getting the number of people vaccinated in this country that need to be vaccinated and that we will let down our guard with some of these safety measures too quickly.

So I think it's to hope for the future absolutely, because we're seeing more people getting vaccinated. We're seeing slow down. We're saying some things of more normal proportion starting to resume, but at the same time, let's do it in a responsible way I think is a message that we have to continue to beat that drum in our communities.

Julie Carter: Yes. Thank you. It's interesting to me because I hear in both the hopes and challenges that you see, The prominence really of several of the core values that drive us. Obviously, safety being prominent among those, preventing harm, but also towards a safe environment for everyone. treating the disease on the one hand, but also working to prevent the disease in the first place certainly furthers that core value.

But I also hear you touch on issues about and making sure those who are most at risk get protected and stewarding our people resources as well as our material resources when there were times of scarcity, and making sure that those are in place as much as possible and then used in a fair and just way.

So interesting how this massive external event beyond anyone's control, I think, really brought to the surface the importance of so many of the values that I see you leading with every day and they became kind of guideposts, I think. That was what I observed and in watching leadership around St. Mary's responding to this.

Montez Carter: Yeah. And I agree. And I think that part of the challenge during the time of this pandemic, as well as a responsibility, is just the varying viewpoints when you look at a single issue. So, there's the viewpoint of the patient, there's the viewpoint of the caregivers that are caring for the patient, how they're impacted and even downstream, particularly with the communicable disease, what the impact is potentially to the families of the caregivers. And then you have this society as a whole and what the impact of the pandemic is for them and even within the society, who are those vulnerable populations that are being impacted in a disproportionate way? And what is our responsibility to be a voice for some of those who are voiceless.

And so, very complex in terms of how we've looked at it in the past and even as we look at it into the future and making sure that that inclusion continues as we're looking forward to what we need to continue to do, as we're headed out of the pandemic and to really kind of have this mentality that no one's left behind as we began to move forward. And so I think that to kind of fight this enemy that you can't see during the pandemic and everything that kind of goes along with that from a psyche perspective, and how it's evolved has really been made truly unlike anything that I know the vast majority of us have ever dealt with in our careers.

Julie Carter: Yes. Thank you. So, 20, 25 years from now, when you are regaling your grandchildren with stories about what this was like, what do you think the big takeaways will be? How are you going to describe this to them?

Montez Carter: Well, I think that I will describe it as, when we have to come together, we can. And that things that we feel like in life and even during the time of this pandemic that were barriers really aren't if we get everyone together and commited to solving an issue. So whether it's the vaccine development, whether it's how we were able to share resources, when they were being stretched from ventilators to personal protective equipment, how we were able to really change policies literally in real time and to educate people on those changes and how we were able to deploy technology in new and innovative ways and just able to embrace that in a way that was meeting the needs.

So I think that, you know, really one of the things that we'll talk about is that some of the issues that we put before us, don't always have to be that it can be different. If we have the right framework and mindset. And I hope that when we're telling the story 25 years from now , that it won't take a pandemic to unlock that and that we'll be more committed to doing that type of work together in a collaborative way, without something bad having happened that we did not want to be faced with, that we're able because of this to not let so many people be impacted as individuals by it, which we know, you know, also impacts families for generations when you have the type of loss that we've seen during the COVID-19 pandemic. So I hope that that's something that 25 years from now that will be a foreign concept, you know, to our grandkids about, some of the barriers and lack of cooperation that we've kind of let get in the way of really innovating what we can be.

Julie Carter: Well, I definitely share that hope and I actually would add that I hope it doesn't take us 25 years to realize that lesson.

Montez Carter: Right.

Julie Carter: Well, thank you. I appreciate you taking the time to talk with me and for sharing those insights, I appreciate you and the way you serve St. Mary's and care so deeply about this family and our larger community.

Thanks to all for listening. This is Julie Carter. Have a blessed day.