Ulrika Wigert, MD

In Sauk Centre, we had a really interesting journey. It goes back to November of 2020 – that’s when Sauk Centre became a COVID-only hospital to support St. Cloud. Because in that surge – during that fall and winter of 2020 – St. Cloud was becoming very, very full. So it became clear that within a very short period of time, the best way to help support St. Cloud was to take those COVID patients that we could care for in our facility that needed oxygen, but didn’t need a ventilator.

It was about five or six weeks that we kind of turned things upside down.

Ulrika Wigert, MD

So we only took care of COVID, we created a hospitalist model, and our OB patients delivered at Melrose during that time. If we had admissions that weren’t COVID, they went to Melrose or Long Prairie or one of the other sites and we worked together to then take their patients if St. Cloud was full. So we really gained our skills during that time.

We had patients that we were able to care for, because we had to, and the nurses stepped up to the plate. It’s hard, it’s scary, but we just did it day by day, and that’s the wisdom of the team. CentraCare quickly set up ways that we could lean on respiratory therapists in Monticello to help us with patients that we couldn’t transfer out that were on a ventilator for a day to a week.

We also created a hotline for the nurses to contact the ICU nurses in St. Cloud, so it was a lot of learning, a lot of education, and a lot of support that we gathered through that.

The most important thing that’s come out of this is the teams and the connections, because no matter what, nobody could get through this on their own. You have to lean on your colleagues; you have to lean on your colleagues in your local site – the people that are next door to me in my office – yet also lean on those colleagues that are in Melrose, Long Prairie, and St Cloud. Those connections you didn’t know you had before that are there in the background, and the people leaning on each other, is what has been most healing and most useful to get through each day.