Deb Peterson, MD

In a small hospital we have a lot of very young nurses; it’s often their first job out of training. And they needed to feel like they were doing a good job when it felt to them like they really weren’t, because they felt like they were in over their head. So I was cheerleading along with taking care of the patients, when often I was also scared to death, because they were some very, very sick people.

We had people in the hospital for weeks that ultimately recovered, but were still quite ill.

Deb Peterson, MD

So I look back, and I think, ‘wow, did we really do it?’ And we did. I learned a lot about medical care, I learned a lot about myself and how to remain resilient. It’s been a journey.

We each had patients that were what you call ‘maxed and stacked.’ They were maxed out on heated high flow, plus they had a nasal cannula underneath, and there was nowhere to send them. And we had to make decisions about whether to intubate or not, because if we intubate we have the vent, but we don’t have a respiratory therapist or the technology to really keep the patient, and is it in the patient’s best interest? So the MOD physician from CentraCare was very, very helpful at kind of handholding with us, helping us make decisions. Having someone else in your corner helping you with that was really helpful. I can’t say enough about it.

I’m not sure that people actually understood how many really, really sick people stayed in Redwood Falls, Litchfield, Paynesville and other western regional hospitals, because of the bed situation. I’m not sure the public actually understands or knows how many really, really sick people we took care of, because you don’t go out and talk about it. And I think people got tired. People that were sick of the pandemic just went into their shell and just didn’t want to hear about it anymore. They went back to what they considered their normal life. So there is a lot of stuff that went on, that we know about, that the general public will never really understand.

Cindy Firkins Smith, MD

One thing that is unique to rural frontline health care workers is that in a small community, everybody knows everybody. So the person who’s coming in, and is critically ill, is oftentimes your neighbor, your friend, or your family member.

So you’re not only trying to save someone’s life, but you’re trying to save someone’s life that you know, and you love and you care about and you live beside.

It creates another layer of emotion, commitment, fear and distress when you feel like you can’t do enough.

Cindy Firkins Smith, MD

We are committed to taking the lessons that we learned from COVID and optimizing them to be better moving forward. What we learned was that with the right support, we could do a lot of things in local hospitals and in local communities that we didn’t think we could do before. And we could do them safely, economically, with people living in those communities delivering the care, and with local families there to support their loved one.

Because the further you have to send a patient away from their home, the more challenging it is to have that support. People want to stay close to home if it’s safe for them and if they can get great care. We will always need a tertiary and quaternary care hospital for really complicated things, and we need to make sure that the complicated things go to the tertiary and quaternary hospitals.

But we don’t want to fill up those hospitals with things that can be taken care of in a critical access hospital or a community hospital. So we’re committed to not snapping back to the way it was before. We want to keep care local when it’s the right thing to do. And that will help us enable St. Cloud Hospital to be available for the patients that really need it.