June 16, 2021

Whatever It Takes

Central, Work Life

Susan Kratzke, Vice President of Senior Services, couldn’t be more proud of how the maintenance team at St. Benedict’s Community responded to the relentless demands of a pandemic. “They never said, ‘Do you realize all the havoc that you’re creating for our team?’ They never complained about all that we asked them to do. To me that speaks to their willingness and eagerness to do what’s right for the residents,” shared Kratzke.

Making it happen

One of the team’s efforts that turned out to be right for St. Benedict’s residents on the St. Cloud campus as well as the wider CentraCare community was establishing a COVID unit. This involved construction and a little creativity.

“We were told we were going to convert one of our short-stay units into a COVID unit that would receive patients from the hospitals and maybe other places within our system,” said John Crane, Manager of Maintenance at St. Benedict’s Community. “So we had to get it ready. We had to look at getting some temporary walls put up to physically isolate the unit. Then we had to look at doing the best we could to achieve a negative-pressure with our HVAC systems.”

A feat of HVAC engineering that St. Benedict’s facility had not originally been designed to accommodate had to be put in place quickly and effectively.

“It was—it was a challenge,” Crane’s understated tone belies the difficulty of his challenge. “We were just not set up that way. But we added a few negative-air machines, which are HEPA filters exhausting out through windows. We had limited options, but we achieved an improvement that minimized the risk to the rest of the population here and still provided a safe means of treating the COVID patients that were going to be coming.”

Gearing up

“In the beginning of the pandemic, April through the end of August, we really had very few patients or residents who utilized our COVID unit,” Kratzke says. “But by mid-September we really started to feel it.” That was when long-term care facilities and housing facilities outside of St. Benedict’s were slammed by waves of COVID cases.

“We accepted residents from all of our sister facilities, as well as some housing communities.”

susan kratzke, Vice president of senior services, centracare

St. Benedict’s maintenance team geared up and sustained, for month after grueling month, a heightened level of performance that can still be witnessed today. Patients arrived from Monticello, Melrose, Sauk Centre, Long Prairie, Paynesville and beyond. “We accepted residents from all of our sister facilities, as well as some housing communities,” Kratzke says.

Flexibility: the secret weapon

St. Benedict’s Maintenance Department’s COVID-fighting efforts included setting up outdoor tents and awnings to eventually allow residents some safer visits. They also implemented a series of redesigned and ramped-up cleaning and maintenance routines. For instance, laundry collection and transport were re-routed through corridors and elevators to avoid residential-living areas. That too helped limit potential exposure to the virus. 

The team responded to every curveball thrown their way with innovative ideas and a flexible working attitude.

“We learned the importance of flexibility,” Kratzke recalls. “Flexibility meant all of us pitching in to cover weekends or to cover an evening shift so that we could do outdoor visits and allow our residents to gather in smaller group areas. Our maintenance teams did more than put up the new physical-safety infrastructures like walls and partitions. Their innovative efforts meant we could keep our residents very safe.”

The team leveraged good planning and flexibility in its fight against COVID-19. It yielded better results than they could have hoped for.

“We were able to receive and care for 167 admits from our community and health system,” Crane said. “We also finished up our third-floor renovation project. That unit was originally designed for long-term care, but we used it for short-stay purposes since our short-stay unit was repurposed as our COVID unit.”

Rapid response

Crane said the pandemic’s rapid onset allowed little time for anxiety, ironically favoring the quick decisions they were able to implement so successfully. “It happened so fast that demands on the ground didn’t really give us a lot of time to think about some of the scarier aspects of what we faced personally,” he says.

Crane is proud of his team and admits through all the changes that he misses the day-to-day contact with residents that he used to enjoy before the pandemic. “I probably get less of that than the rest of my team; and I’m almost jealous,” he says. “It’s nice to interact on a personal level with a resident by name. I think it’s so important to look at somebody and know their name – just to be able call out, ‘Hi, Jerry’ or ‘Hi, Julie.’”

“It happened so fast that demands on the ground didn’t really give us a lot of time to think about some of the scarier aspects of what we faced.”

John Crane, Manager of Maintenance, St. Benedict’s Community

Limitations of visits at residential care facilities produced some of the most heart-wrenching images of news coverage during the pandemic. “It’s hard to explain how lonely COVID patients can be,” Crane laments. “A lot of them are in isolation, and not just isolated within the unit or the building, but isolated within their room for safety reasons. What does a person do to pass the day away? On most days, the TV is your best friend. So if a TV goes out, it’s a top priority for us.”

Facilities maintenance as a life-saving practice comes in many forms these days at St. Benedict’s Community…and beyond.