The Heart of Resilience: Leading the Way Forward During the COVID-19 Pandemic

By Todd Stevens, President & CEO

For Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center, resilience isn’t a choice — it’s a necessity. Our mission-critical work providing treatment for cancer patients across the continuum of care means that whatever obstacles we face, we must continue to do our mission.

Resiliency for us is defined by our ability to continue to provide life-saving cancer services to our patients and community. Allowing a crisis, even one with the magnitude of a global pandemic, to disrupt this ability to provide essential care to cancer patients is simply not an option.

Louisiana has been tested many times before. From the devastating impact of Hurricane Katrina to the historic 2016 floods, we have faced crises head on and persevered. The coronavirus pandemic might differ in the scope and scale, but our response to it draws on the lessons learned shepherding our organization through these other challenges.

Driven by Commitment

Passion and a dedication to serve fuel our organization from the C-suite to frontline workers. Cancer treatment is complex. It’s not simply providing care to patients as they are diagnosed — it involves creating a comprehensive, integrated treatment plan that spans the entire continuum of cancer care, from community education and prevention to early detection, diagnosis and treatment and to survivorship. 

COVID-19 blew up the cancer care continuum. It has caused disruptions to preventative screenings so that patients do not know that they are facing a life-threatening illness. It has caused treatment to be interrupted or delayed. These are life and death challenges. And we are overcoming them, anticipating how we could quickly reassemble the pieces and relaunch as many programs and services as quickly as possible. 

Cancer centers around the country are noting a decline in cancer diagnoses, but we know that’s not a result of a 70 percent decline in cancer rates. It’s a result of the disruption to the diagnosis and treatment of cancer.

Resiliency for our organization means getting all points of the cancer care continuum up and running, perhaps in enhanced ways, such as telemedicine. Luckily, we have highly engaged, highly experienced staff and leadership in place that live and breathe making a difference in the communities we serve. They are driven by their passion and their commitment to solve the problems presented by the current crisis and advance our mission, no matter what.

Having a single-minded mission focus on cancer allows team members to stay committed to the job at hand. This passion and commitment can help organizations overcome even the most challenging obstacles. 

Empowering People to Solve the Big Problems

Resiliency means facing — and solving — the big problems. To do that, people need the resources to identify and implement creative solutions.

Empowering leaders to act swiftly to address emerging challenges has been critical to Mary Bird Perkins’ ability to respond to this crisis and minimize patient impact. For example, even before Louisiana Gov. Bel Edwards announced the lifting of the state stay-at-home order, our vice president overseeing preventative services was already at work developing a plan to reopen community-based programs in a way that would protect patients and staff during the COVID-19 pandemic while still allowing us to provide education and early detection screenings. The result? Mobile medical clinics are now offering screenings by appointment with safety and cleaning protocols developed to protect staff and patients. Paperwork has also been streamlined and a texting system has been initiated so patients can remain in their vehicle until it is their turn to enter our mobile medical unit. 

Providing key leadership with the tools and resources they need to find creative solutions for complex but mission-critical problems allows us to act swiftly and nimbly and continue to serve our patients and community. 

Staying Future-Oriented in the Face of Crisis

In moments of crisis, people tend to hunker down and freeze planning and strategy. But that’s a mistake. Organizations and companies that take a wait-and-see approach will ultimately end up lagging behind those that move ahead of the curve to anticipate and adapt to the new paradigm. 

Staying future-oriented can help you navigate out of a crisis. Look at the long game and identify a plan now that provides a framework for the future.

We challenged ourselves to figure out the immediacy of the response needed to take care of patients and our team in the moment and at the same time created a framework for providing the high quality, essential cancer care as COVID-19 evolved.

Our outreach program, for example, offers more than 200 screenings through two mobile medical clinics and screens 10,000 patients a year at no cost to economically-disadvantaged individuals or others with health disparities. How we offer these services has changed. How can we continue to offer this critical service in the face of mass quarantines and a novel virus pandemic that will likely continue for at least the next year? 

If we are going to continue to offer our essential early detection and treatment services, our planning for that future had to begin as the pandemic emerged. 

Balancing Team Members Needs With Mission

Mission comes first at Mary Bird Perkins, and that means supporting our people. Without supporting our team and providing them the resources they need to safeguard themselves and their families, we can’t achieve our mission of providing excellent cancer care.

Our team members have an emotionally difficult job. They provide care and support to chronically-ill patients. To do this job, they are wired to put the needs of others before themselves. They are dedicated to the mission and have a passion to serve.

We recognize how giving our team is. But there's a balance. Burnout and the mental stress of caring for critically-ill patients can catch up with them. An ethos of empathy and care has to infuse our organization from top to bottom. 

That means we work to anticipate the needs of our team members in crisis. For example, existing responses to crises such the 2016 floods have resulted in our team member support program. In our response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we worked quickly to determine what we needed to keep our team members at work, such as offering childcare programs, and how we could help them balance their responsibilities at work and at home.

We attract empathetic team members with a passion for helping others. If we want the best team possible, we have to assist them by providing the support they need. We have to pay for that ethos of care, and not just with salary and benefits or bonuses. We have to pay for it by returning their empathy and dedication with compassion and support that restores to them what they need to serve our mission day in and day out.