The Foundation

How I Heard

At the bottom of a North Carolina mountain, with both a sleeping bag and my youngest daughter in hand, and preparing to quickly climb 92 steps to get the “best cabin bunk” for her summer camp...That’s where I was when I heard about the mass shooting that took place at Pulse nightclub in Orlando. It was early Sunday morning, June 12, 2016, and yet another tragedy in America had occurred.

Synopsis

There are about 2,112 steps from Pulse nightclub to the Level One Trauma Center at Orlando Health Orlando Regional Medical Center (ORMC). On an ordinary day, a person could walk that in under 10 minutes, but that day was anything but ordinary. It’s funny how we go through life one step at a time everyday not recognizing or just taking for granted where our steps may lead us. Our steps can become life-changing, unpredictable or even devastating in our society’s current reality.  Whether it’s going to a concert, club, school, work, a marathon, church, a theater, softball practice or a bike trail -- some of us have taken those steps and not survived. But still we put one foot in front of the other….because that is where survival leads us. The show must go on…

For more than 15 years, I have enjoyed the privilege of serving as a leader in the Orlando Health Foundation, a department designed to help connect community investors and their philanthropic gifts with Orlando Health’s mission to improve and save lives. Orlando Health Foundation has successfully raised more than $450 million dollars in its 35-year history. Over the years, we have provided significant funding to our children’s hospital, our cancer center and our Level One Trauma Center -- the very place that became a beacon of hope for the victims who were able to escape the club that night.    

Response

Our Foundation department works closely with both the External Affairs and Strategic Marketing departments to serve as diplomats for the community and keep our important constituents, partners, donors, patients and families informed about our healthcare facilities and services. But, racing back through four states from North Carolina to Florida, I realized that all of our corporate departments had the responsibility to collaborate even more effectively on a whole new level because news of the shooting was traveling very fast and broadly.

Our organization was thrown onto the international stage with media outlets camped out for the days and weeks following this horrific event. Our teams handled everything from press conferences to requests from politicians, celebrities and the President to donations of money (for patients, their families and our hospital staff), gift cards and food deliveries to visitation requests from everyone you could possibly imagine.

We were all inundated with people just wanting to help. Our responsibility was to direct them in the most appropriate way to support the efforts of our clinical and administrative teams, our now 44 patients and their families, and the entire community as we came to grips with the magnitude of the mass casualty that would impact Orlando and its residents forever.

I spent the 10-hour drive home on my cell phone working with many colleagues and our teams to help develop plans and to gather resources for the extraordinary level of inquiries we would receive from people all over the world. Our responsibility was to guide them through not only an immediate response to this event, but also through the weeks and months until our last patient was discharged and even through the one-year anniversary of the Pulse shootings. Our teams updated the messaging on all of our social media outlets; we notified our switchboard; we held endless conference calls to make edits and changes in response to the community’s requests and needs, always with the goal of doing the right thing. 

At the foundation, we had a special team (from interns to executives) who agreed to help answer the volumes of emails and phone calls. We had to set up funds to account for the gifts from the community. .We worked closely with the local community foundation as well as the mayor’s office to ensure we were all in unison on how and where money would be directed. We always are concerned about illegitimate or fraudulent charities or “go fund me” sites that crop up in these relief efforts (goodwill looters) that try to take advantage of people’s kindness. Our teams handled things very well and when we didn’t, we were flexible enough to make adjustments. The playbook is dynamic when you serve in a diplomatic role facing out toward the community in a very tense and emotional tragedy such as this. But we are professionals who work for a hospital and are conditioned for crises.

Lessons Learned

One of Orlando Health’s major lessons learned regarding communication was that we needed to purchase a mass notification system that can continually alert specific hospital departments and individuals to respond and provide immediate updates on the incident situation.

Closer coordination between the Internal Communications and Telecommunications Departments was another identified need. Overhead pages sometimes conflicted with timing of email blasts sent from internal communications. New processes between the two departments have since been established.

What we didn’t fully comprehend was how important it was to let team members use our communication channels to express themselves.

A few days after the Pulse event, our president and CEO received an email message from the CEO of the vendor that provides our online recognition program. Team members typically use this platform to send messages of thanks, called Kudos, to their colleagues for exemplifying one of our standards of behavior.

Employees of the recognition vendor noticed extremely high volumes on their servers coming from Orlando Health on June 12 and in the days following the tragedy.

More than 3,320 Kudos were sent from Sunday, June 12, to Saturday, June 18, 2016 — double the amount sent the week before the tragedy. The first related Kudos was sent at 6:30 am on June 12, followed by another 250 that day. On Monday, June 13, more than 730 Kudos messages of thanks and pride were sent, more than five times the number of Kudos sent the previous Monday.

Clearly our team members wanted to express themselves and were using Orlando Health’s recognition platform as a channel to do so. Here is a sample of the type of Kudos sent.

To: Members of ORMC Emergency Services

Kudos: I want to thank everyone that was directly and indirectly involved in taking care of all the ER patients this weekend. This weekend brought to light the fact that you are all Heroes. You took care of every single patient with professionalism and compassion in the face of these extreme circumstances. This weekend you all showed your valor, determination and commitment to this family. We are all here for each other in the good times and the bad times. I feel privileged and proud to work with you.

What we learned was that our role was more than communicating information; it also was providing team members the opportunity to share and communicate with each other. The results were several amazing video productions and countless messages of thanks and pictures posted on our intranet.

Conclusion

Ironically, it was on my oldest daughter’s 16^th birthday (one more scary step at a time) when I was asked to reach out and provide help to the foundation for University Medical Center of Southern Nevada, the Las Vegas hospital and Level One Trauma Center that treated the victims from the concert shooting on October 1, 2017, just a short 15 months after Pulse. In Orlando Health’s consistent spirit of sharing best practices across the industry, we provided UMCSN Foundation with guidance and reassurance on how to best handle their next steps in response to yet another senseless shooting.   

Key Takeaways

Whether a man-made or natural disaster, sadness abounds and yet we walk on -- one foot in front of the other through crisis situations such as these.

• Collaboration abounds: We can take great comfort in the fact that everyone can play an important role in helping, to ensure we are making good decisions and serving the needs of others that arise, even those needs that we can’t always predict.
• Kindness abounds: You are not on your own. Utilize the resources around you and know that you can count on the kindness of our community to assist. Charity and goodwill are two of the many things that I love about our organization and this country.