HJNO Mar/Apr 2024

HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF NEW ORLEANS I  MAR / APR 2024 15 a significant economic driver on the North- shore, and we're not unique. It's an eco- nomic driver in any community that they impact, and it's an economic driver both in terms of jobs and productivity. In our area, it contributes more than $1.5 billion across three parishes. In the height of the pandemic, the head of St. Tammany Corporation Economic Devel- opment Organization was Chris Masingill. and he and I, over coffee, were talking about where things were. I serve on their board of commissioners. He quickly realized work- force was our biggest challenge. His ques- tion was, “What do you think the other health systems' biggest challenge is?” And I said, “Well, I'm fairly certain they would all say workforce.” So, he pulled together, over the course of a year and a half, all of the major health systems in a tri-parish area: Tangipahoa, St. Tammany, andWashington Parish. He realized we also needed to bring in the academic institutions because if we're going to all work together to solve this and create a future pipeline, we needed to all have the conversation together. That's really how Northshore Healths- cape began. All of those major players — St. Tammany Health System; Ochsner Health; Our Lady of the Lake, which is an FMOL facility in Bogalusa; Riverside in Franklin- ton, Louisiana; Slidell Memorial; and North Oaks in Tangipahoa — came together with Northshore Technical Community College, Southeastern, and Florida Parishes to create Northshore Healthscape. Northshore Healthscape began in 2022 as a three-year sector pilot with emphasis on workforce, and we all put in seed money so that we could hire a consultant to meet with all of us, with our teams, with the com- munity, and really think through some of the opportunities that may exist to create an ecosystem for economic development to recruit businesses and industry into our markets to better support the workforce. We are now kicking off year two. We've gotten the consultant’s report back, and, quite honestly, it's been wildly successful thus far — just better understanding and appreciating one another; supporting one another in a more meaningful way; and also, as I mentioned earlier, working with our academic partners to accelerate pro- gramming, build programs, or do whatever they can to help healthcare continue to cre- ate a pipeline for the workforce well into the future. Editor As a CEO of a hospital in “hurricane country,” is there anything unique that St. Tammany is doing to prepare for that type of emergency or any other unexpected event? Coffman I rode out Hurricane Katrina over at Lindy Boggs in NewOrleans. To compare and contrast, here we were many years later going through Hurricane Ida. St. Tammany, long before Joan Coffman, had done a lot of proactive things. They really focused heavily, not unlike other health systems, on the environment of care and making sure that we have emergency preparedness. The entire leadership team knows what their role is during an emergency, how to respond, what resources we're going to need, and howwe're going to organize those resources. But the thing that gave St. Tammany Health System a leg up during Hurricane Katrina that many did not have was that they had a water well, because water was a hot commodity back in the days of Hurri- cane Katrina, as you can imagine. It's been a great asset to the organization to have that on site. I think other health systems, Chil- dren's Hospital in New Orleans, for exam- ple, now have a well, but that was a learned opportunity for many during Hurricane Katrina. St. Tammany was also able to fulfill the water needs of other community agen- cies during that time. Emergency preparedness is something that should be practiced every day. It's not something you think about when hurricane season rolls around. You have to be pre- pared always, just like Joint Commission, making sure that you have anything that will give you a leg up. I'll give you another great example of how amazing our community is. During Hurri- cane Ida, one of the things that we were challenged by was getting the workforce back in because they couldn't get gas any- where. I put out communication to a lot of our supporters — whether it was our board of trustees for the foundation, our board of commissioners, anybody that would lis- ten — that we really needed a fuel truck. If we could get our hands on a fuel truck, we could help our colleagues get back and forth to work because they were willing, they just didn't have access to gasoline. One of our community members, Chip Lavigne, came to the rescue and said, "Joan, I'm on it. We'll get you a tank over there. Tell me