HJNO Mar/Apr 2025

ROUNDTABLE 14 MAR / APR 2025 I  HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF NEW ORLEANS fighters and people from across the river, and it was jarring. But people come together because you trust each other, you know each other. You work side by side, shoulder to shoulder, day after day. And you see a lot of jarring things. This was a global event, but on almost a daily basis, we see things that are really traumatizing — children, horrible situations in various ways. I think that, at the risk of opening a can of worms, one of the things that concerns me right now is a situation where we have a nurse's union. I'm not going to speak to the appropriateness of it — we all have griev- ances — but one of the concerns I have per- sonally and professionally is that there's now an entity that is compromising inter- personal relationships that I see between nurses, between nurses and physicians, between nurses and administrators. I just want to put it out that I think that we work really well together because we trust each other and we have a good personal rela- tionship, and I am concerned that this new entity is going to affect that. Editor Oh, nursing strike — we'll talk about that on a different day. Were there any moments of humanity or connections with patients that really stood out? Lacy Several. I actually got the notification through social media, and then I went back and looked at my emails and was like, "Oh, there've been notifications." I just came in and didn't have an assigned role in the plan because my position's a little bit unique, but I knew that I could be of assistance. When I got here and asked, "Hey, what can I do?" They graciously volunteered me to help out in the notification center. When I was in the notification center, I saw a lot of humanity that day. Not just between my colleagues and I, but between our administrative staff and the patients that we were trying to take care of, the patients' families that we were trying to care of. There were some really wonderful moments. The families that were there, that had been there for hours and were just trying to wake up their hungover kids, "Hey, I know you were out there on Bourbon and need you to answer the phone call." They finally picked up, so you had that wave of relief that you could see in their faces, and there were tears of joy. But at the same time, there were several patients or family members that did not get the greatest news that day. At least for us, our emergency manage- ment team had the clinical plan down pat. We knew how to take care of these patients. That's a well-oiled machine. That gave us the opportunity to then extend that humble- ness and that care just like you would open your home. So, that's what I saw that day and was able to help facilitate, which was really touching — very humbling, very important — because those people were coming just looking for answers. They were just trying to go some- where to find answers on their loved ones. I'm not sure exactly how they learned to come to us other than we have this won- derful reputation of being a trauma cen- ter where we give answers. So, they came here, and we were able to provide them a safe space to be able to get those answers. Elder The first probably two to two and a half hours of this incident were focused strictly on patients coming in, patient care. Who's the sickest?Who do we need to take care of?What resources do we have? Pretty quickly, once we got everybody triaged, and we knew where we were going with all the patients, we knew it was going to become a reunification issue. That was going to be the next step in this. Initially, we said, "Okay, we know we're going to get some family. Let's find a place to put some people."We had our public safety cordon off an area of the ER, part of our very long waiting room, and we put family there. Pretty quickly, they said, "Hey, look, we're going to fill this up. It's already filling up." At that point, we had some of our admin- istration there and some extra hands and we said, "Okay, now we're going to have to turn this on downstairs. We're going to move to the conference center, and that's where we're going to do this family reuni- fication." We then started to direct families there. We also started to receive phone calls from people looking for loved ones. For me, I had been on scene with EMS during one of our Mardi Gras incidents where we had a drunk driver hit people in the crowd, and it was in an area that was highly congested. The cell service that night had gone down in that area, and people couldn't get people on the phone. People then thought that their loved ones were injured when they really just couldn't get them on the phone because the cell service was poor in that area. That was years ago. I've been through that before and saw what that looked like. Here, we started to get phone calls on our EMS line. Somehow that number got out there. We started getting family members call- ing that line. We really have to protect that number because it's an important number. And so, we were able to quickly stand up a call center here on site that typically would not be in our purview as a hospital. But the fact that we were getting these patients, we ended up getting hundreds of phone calls over the next couple hours. A couple of us ended up in the room where we had all the phones set up — pretty quickly by our IT team — and the phone just kept ringing. We were doing other things, but we had to just start answering the phone. You're talking to families of people who just don't know where their loved one is. They may be at home asleep. They were out in the French Quarter, but they made it home just fine. And now they were just still asleep because it was early on New Year's Day … Then it hit me when I got somebody who called, and they were the family member of someone who was a patient. Because I had already been dealing with the list of the patients, I realized that pretty quickly. Then we had to figure out, okay, what do we tell people?Where do we send them?What do we do? And some of these people were out of town. That really became a moment