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access other clinical information. So, that has been a big focus for us. We continue to focus on our service and patient experi- ence in all of our clinics, outpatient areas, and hospitals. We did see an improvement in our patient experience in 2021, even though we went through hurricanes and two surges, and certainly, we’re pleased to see that improvement. The fourth area is growth and expansion — how we can continue to provide more services in the markets we’re in today and expand to new markets in and outside of Louisiana. We are very focused to continue to work with physicians or hire physicians in each of the areas that we serve today in Louisiana and are really focused on building our centers of excellence such as neurosci- ence, cancer, transplant, pediatrics, women’s care, and orthopedics. We’re very focused on and continue to grow and expand each of those areas as well as our ongoing focus to grow and expand primary care. I’d say the fifth area is around what I would call “resilience” — supporting our employees, building a stronger culture of gratitude and appreciation, continuing to get closer to our employees and under- stand the challenges and issues they have each and every day, making sure that we do everything we can, as an executive team and as a management team, to make our employees’ability to do their jobs and serve patients is as easy as possible. It’s been a challenge over the past couple of years, and we need to continue to do everything we can to make it easier for our employees and to be the employer of choice. We really want to be the place people want to come, spend their career, and spend their time working. Editor On to COVID for a second. As this interview happens, the Omicron variant wave has peaked, hopefully. I know you don’t have a crystal ball, but as a general in this fight, what are you anticipating as far as COVID variants, their effect on staff, patients, and the community at large? Thomas First, I’ll preface my comments with, I am not a clinician, and I’m not going to give you a clinical prediction on this, but I will tell you what I’mhearing from our clini- cians and what our view is. I think COVID- 19, whether it’s the current variant or future variants is going to continue to be part of our life now in this world, in this country, in this state, and in the cities that we serve. And so, we have to learn to continue to evolve the way we live our lives and do it in a world where we’re going to have COVID- 19 ongoing. We will have spikes from time to time. We will have new variants. It does appear that the variants are getting more contagious but not as severe a clinical case as what we’ve seen in Delta and previous variants. So, certainly, the vaccines that have been administered appear to be work- ing. If you look at the folks we have in our hospitals, a majority of them are unvacci- nated. Even though we do see breakthrough cases and there are some people that are vaccinated, very few people that are actu- ally boosted (having three shots) are being admitted to the hospital. We’ve got to con- tinue to educate around vaccines. More than likely, we’ll have more boosters in the future, and hopefully people will take those boost- ers because from everything we can see in the hospital and in our clinics, they’re effec- tive. Folks that are getting COVID, Omicron, those that are vaccinated really are not hav- ing very severe cases at all. I would say this becomes an ongoing part of life, similar to how we have the flu, and we need to continue to adjust and pre- pare for that like we do flu and other esca- lation of healthcare services in the future. So, we’re thinking about it knowing that we will have these fights. Hopefully they won’t be as severe in the future, and hopefully we’ll continue to have good vaccines and/ or therapies that will allow us to fight the virus effectively. Editor Speaking of vaccines, the Louisiana Supreme Court recently upheld Ochsner’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for healthcare workers. Give us an insider’s view of how that went and the impact it had or is hav- ing on your staff. Thomas We’re very pleased with the Louisi- ana Supreme Court decision to find in favor of our approach to the vaccine require- ments. The reality is that we’re here to protect our workforce and to protect our patients, and vaccines are FDA approved. They’re effective against the COVID-19 virus, and we felt very strongly that we need to follow the science and also be a leader in healthcare in requiring the vaccine for our employees. We’ve had actually very few employees leave the organization — it’s a pretty small number and less than 1%. We saw a pretty good compliance as we went through that process — most people really complied with the vaccine requirement. We did have some, a percent or two, that were given exemptions for religious or medi- cal reasons. But otherwise, we saw great compliance, and we have not seen a major number of workers leave the organization because of the vaccine requirement. Editor Is today’s healthcare workforce in Louisiana sufficient to handle current and projected needs? How are you managing shortages and building a larger pipeline? Thomas I would say it is not adequate to handle our current needs or our future needs. Right now, we’ve got shortages. We’ve got hundreds of open clinical posi- tions that we’re trying to fill — nursing in hospitals and clinics, medical assistants, surgical techs, really across the board, we’ve got hundreds and hundreds of open posi- tions. So, it is not adequate. It’s one of the reasons we’ve built strong relationships in the academic institutions for the past cou- ple of years. We brought Chamberlain University to Louisiana and a partnership with Ochsner a couple of years ago. That’s been a very effec- tive partnership, and we’ve hired hundreds of nurses fromChamberlain University. We HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF NEW ORLEANS I  MAR / APR 2022 11