Rolee Petersen

When we are ‘diverting’ a patient, we are telling them there is no bed and that they are going to have to look somewhere else. We have never I don’t think in history ever diverted the amount of patients as we have in the last two years – we have always been able at some point to fit them in. It is really hard to say ‘no’ when you know that you have the facility that they need, the higher level of care, the physician, everything! But you just can’t make it work, because of staffing or because of a bed issue.

Sometimes you just can’t hear yourself say “no” again, because you know that the person on the other end of the line has to go and tell that family that St. Cloud just doesn’t have a bed.

Rolee Petersen, Administrative Nursing Supervisor

We all know that patient sitting in that hospital could easily be one of our own family members. And I think that just speaks volumes to all of us in how hard we work every single day to try and fit every patient into the right bed and get them here for a higher level of care. Whether it be for a cardiac arrest or COVID or a simple surgery like an appendectomy –  there are facilities that just are unable to do those things. And if we say no, now they have to hang up with us and now they’re calling the next hospital and the next hospital.

We’ve been putting in so many hours. In the last few years we’ve spent more time at our jobs with our work family than we have with our own family. Sometimes we were in the thick of it so much that we didn’t always realize that things weren’t going well or were falling apart at home. We were trying to do our best by juggling it all. And every day, we would show up for work and dig in again. You just keep going, day after day, you keep coming back and you just try to do your best. How much our staff gives is just absolutely incredible.