George Morris, MD

Boy, when we band everybody together, oh my gosh can we move mountains. And we really helped impact our employees, our community and in essence, we demonstrated what we can do across the state during the pandemic.

Boy, when we band everybody together, oh my gosh can we move mountains.

George Morris, MD

A lot of times we focus on what we did for CentraCare in our communities. But we had our ICU doctors helping train people in a lot of non-CentraCare places on how to do ventilator management, how to help support their nurses, how to manage different medications, and protocols. Truly, I think the weight that we can carry using our people is tremendous and it’s something that we can lean on whether it’s for the next pandemic, or for whatever change comes next.

The hardest thing for me personally was my sense of failure. I know we saved lives, but we lost so many. And we had so much harm done with the community where we had people butting heads with each other. I’m probably too much of a perfectionist, and we should be thankful and grateful for all the positives, but it was really hard to not dwell on the negatives. You have to recognize and acknowledge them but you can’t stay there.

I want to recognize the time and effort that our teams put into this. Everybody had to do their regular work – whether it was COVID patients or regular patients or administrative leaders – and we asked them to do more for two plus years. Thank you for all that time and commitment. It’s really hard because we’d like to give everyone a two-year vacation, but we can’t quite do that. So we’d like to acknowledge some need to slow down, self-reflect, care for yourself and care for each other. And we still have a role as healthcare leaders in our community that we have to do going forward.