THOMASVILLE — Staff at Archbold Memorial Hospital woke up ready to go to work Monday morning — even if their sleeping accommodations may not have been ideal Sunday night.

With Hurricane and later Tropical Storm Irma churning through Florida, Archbold leaders called in staff to stay at the hospital — with management also hunkered down there.

The purpose was many-fold, Archbold leaders said. It allowed their staff to be at the hospital as they were needed and it prevented them from having to drive through the storm and over potentially dangerous roads to get to work.

“We’re extremely proud,” Archbold CEO and President Perry Mustian said of the staff. 

“We can’t say enough,” said Archbold Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Jim Carter.

Archbold management huddled in the hospital’s emergency operations center, monitoring screens and updates, tracking the storm and all the moving pieces that went into planning for the event.

The planning for weathering the storm started as early as the day after Labor Day. When Mustian called together the management team, many of them already had their courses of action ready. For instance, Mustain pointed out, the pharmacy director ordered additional medications. Other departments called in orders for more food, water and other supplies.

“It was interesting to see a number of the leadership team had put plans in place,” he said. “It didn’t require anybody to take any official action. It was impressive to see the management team step up on their own and take initiative and action, not wait for someone to say ‘we might have a potential problem.’ I think everyone was fairly tuned into this. That was impressive to see.”

Irma’s impact was suspected to be worse than it was, and as a result of the warnings, the hospital staff was told to be ready for spending two days there.

“We were thinking we could be for a much longer period of time without power,” Mustian said. “For a much longer period of time we might not be able to move staff around. That’s one reason we asked staff to come in Sunday night to be able to stay for two full days. We didn’t have a clear of picture of what this was going to do and what it would do to the community.”

Though storms have hit the area before, it hasn’t had hurricane force winds since the mid 1980s. The forecast, as Archbold officials began to prepare, called for winds of hurricane-strength to hit Monday. Such winds could bring down trees and power lines and block roads.

Staff also brought in family members to stay, and the hospital provided a temporary, emergency day care on site. 

“You’ve got to make the call at what you think is the right time on the best information available to you,” Mustian said. “It was really something to see as we went through the entire week. We opened up a day care as an example for staff who didn’t have any way to care for their children. We didn’t want them to not be able to come to work.”

More than 260 staff members were asked to come in, and that meant finding them places to stay, providing food for them and their families and find them places to shower. The hospital has cots, which also can be used for patients in a mass casualty incident, and the hospital also made provisions to have enough clean linens to last for staff and patients.

“You have to have clean linen to run a health care organization,” Mustian said. “When you get 200 people who come in, we don’t have 200 beds lying around.”

At the crux of the preparations, hospital officials said, was the safety of the patients and the staff.

“Our first priority is to the patients who are here and the organization, and we also feel we have a priority to our staff,” Mustian said. “We want to make sure we are prepared for those impacted by the storm.”

Contrary to some rumors, the hospital did not evacuate, Mustian said. While it is not a shelter, the hospital took in some people with health-related issues, finding space for them in the same-day surgery center. 

“We did have some members of the community who came here and had some health-related conditions that might not have met the criteria to be admitted to the hospital, but we were concerned enough about their condition to house them from the storm,” Mustian said. “We had someone come from a shelter who ran out of oxygen. We weren’t comfortable with them going back. But we felt like we had a responsibility that anybody who had a health-related condition, we wanted to be prepared to care for them.”

One of the lessons learned from Irma, hospital officials said, was better coordination of what shelters are available and those shelters’ capacities, not only for local residents who might have to evacuate but also for evacuees from other areas fleeing a storm.

Last year, the hospital housed patients evacuated from coastal Georgia hospitals during Hurricane Matthew. Because Irma’s track carried it over Thomasville, hospital officials decided not to take in patients from other facilities.

The hospital also cancelled all elective procedures for Monday and Tuesday, performing only emergency surgeries. Dialysis treatments for the beginning of the week were moved to Sunday.

“They started in the wee hours Sunday,” Carter said. “You can’t take several days off from dialysis.”

Leaders at Archbold also stayed in constant contact with the hospitals, clinics and other arms of the health system.

“Throughout our entire hospital system, patient care was not interrupted,” said Mark Lowe, senior vice president for planning and marketing.

Hospital leaders also are looking at backup emergency power for more systems. When the north tower was built, a new energy plant with four generators was installed.

“It’s pretty impressive,” Mustian said of the multi-million dollar project. “But it’s paid off for us.”

Seeing what happened to New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina and what a tornado did to Sumter Regional Hospital in Americus led Archbold leaders to think about what to do in those situations. That included having additional fuel storage for generators.

“When Katrina happened, it really was a wake up call for a lot of organizations for how bad a situation can be,” Carter said, “just how long you might have to survive on generator power, just how long you might be cut off from the world. We began to look for ways to strengthen our preparedness. When it comes to an event like this, there have been some things that have been years in the making. We have a lot more emergency power than we did in previous decades.”

The hospital conducts various exercises, such as disaster and mass casualty scenarios. 

“We have exercises throughout the year, so it’s part of the practice we get for the real event,” Lowe said.

When a computer virus was thought to be attacking the hospital’s system, an emergency plan went into place. The hospital’s emergency operations center, which is in a central location, has generator power available to keep it running.

“In all of these events, there are certain things that are constant, housing, staffing, patient care, food, so they all work together,” said Chuck Winchester, Archbold’s emergency management coordinator. “Some of the issues that can used for improvement in an IT event can be used in a weather event. That all-hazard approach is useful. At the same time, it’s not taking us by surprise. That’s why we exercise and that’s why we train.”

Mustian said it was the first time in 18 years he’s slept in his office and staff and management is prepared to do it again, if necessary.

“We did the right thing for our patients and at the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about,” he said. “We are proud of the preparedness and the response. It’s a great organization and it really did come together. I think the community should be comfortable that we’re prepared. We have a great team and great folks who are committed to what they do and committed to the patients they care for. Archbold’s ready. That’s our takeaway.”