April 3, 2020
Community Update #4
Dear Community Member,
This is update #4 in my continued effort to keep you informed of BMH actions to deal with the effects and spread of COVID-19, please be aware of the following:
Main Entrance: This entrance is now open Monday-Friday 6:30am-4:00pm.
If you arrive at the Hospital outside of those times please enter through the Emergency Department. This change in hours is due to the BMH Outpatient Lab and MRI no longer offering Saturday hours.
Screenings/Temperatures: In order to safeguard all staff and patients, Brattleboro Memorial Hospital has now imposed mandatory health screening upon entry to the Hospital and Medical Group practices. Upon entering these locations you will be screened for symptoms of COVID-19, which will include a temperature screen. We ask for your patience with this new process and be mindful of social distancing while waiting to be screened.
Personal Protective Equipment (PPE): As we are now requiring all staff to wear masks, the reusable cloth masks produced and handmade by the community have allowed us to conserve masks used for clinical and patient care. The staff is enjoying these masks and we want to continue to encourage these donations. If you would like to learn more about making masks or gowns, click
here.
Consolidation of Medical Group Practices: As previously reported, we have consolidated our outpatient primary care practices from six to three. During this time, patients may receive care from a clinician that is not their primary care provider. All of BMH’s Medical Group clinicians share an electronic record so the clinicians will have access to patient’s health records. When patients call their primary care office to schedule an appointment, they will be routed to a temporary practice and given instruction as to the address of the practice where they will receive care.
Employee Furloughs: To prepare for the potential surge of Covid19 patients, all hospitals have temporarily reduced services such as elective surgery, outpatient radiology and lab, etc. From the BMH perspective, the corresponding reduction in our revenue is approximately 80%. This situation has required us to institute a furlough program for non-essential, non-clinical staff. The furloughs, which represent less than 10 percent of our workforce, will enable us to continue to focus our resources on the functions directly related to essential COVID-19 patient care needs, while protecting our staff and helping to prevent the spread of the virus. Furloughed employees have a personalized meeting with our Human Resource staff to review continuation of health benefits, use of earned time, unemployment benefit eligibility, redeployment and recall process.
These are unprecedented times for our health care system which require unprecedented responses and, unfortunately, these furloughs are one of many actions we must take. In my 10 years as CEO at BMH, we have never had a workforce reduction of this magnitude and it is my personal goal to bring back all staff after this pandemic subsides.
COVID-19 BMH Dashboard:
We have created a real-time dashboard for our community to monitor several key indicators related to the virus,
specific to BMH. The dashboard can be accessed on our website
here. We will continue to evaluate adding additional indicators as appropriate over the next several weeks.
Our Staff: In addition to these community updates, I send regular emails to our staff. I want to share with you my closing comments from this week’s staff email:
On behalf of every member of Administration and our Board of Directors, I want to express our sincere thanks and appreciation for all that you do for our patients, our community and your fellow staff. Like you, I look forward to returning to our pre-Covid19 days where we can shake each other’s hands, give welcome embraces, talk without masks and within 6ft distance, not be screened upon entering the Hospital or our medical practices, enjoy ice cream socials and bar-b-ques, provide employment for all 600 staff and do all the things we were doing just 3 weeks ago…which I know feels like a lot longer! But for now we must do all the things we ask you to do (social distancing, hand washing, taking your temperature, etc.) so that we can return to those much better days as quickly as possible.
