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Director of trauma, safety and medical staff services, Bayfront Medical Center, St. Petersburg
By KRIS HUNDLEY, Times staff writer
© St. Petersburg Times, published March 3, 2003
Q. As the person in charge of Bayfront's trauma center, you run a business where crisis is the norm. What advice do you have for managers when they're faced with a crisis?
This might sound trite, but you have to stop, take a deep breath, back up and look at the big picture. You've got to try not to knee-jerk the situation, but take a couple of seconds to get it all in. I find I have to remind myself to go through that every time. It's human nature to want to leap and fix the situation, but I have to remind myself to make sure I have all the pieces of the puzzle to make the best decision I can at the time.
Q. You run a service that everyone values highly until it comes time to pay. How do you try to get people to value what they receive from you?
I think you do that by treating people with respect and make them understand we didn't provide a gift for them, we provided a true service by giving them all the levels of care, not just emergency. The trauma department is a resource and it's something to be treasured. It's a very difficult resource to have, it takes a lot of physician commitment and financial commitment. It takes a lot of heart to do trauma and definitely a lot of money. That's really the biggest challenge I have, getting the message out so people understand it is a valuable resource and we need to maintain it.
Q. You've been working as a registered nurse at Bayfront for 13 years. What's changed?
Our services haven't changed and though there are more patients, the types of injuries haven't changed. The biggest thing is that trauma physicians are working harder and harder and getting much less benefit than ever before. There are financial repercussions to hospitals and physicians doing trauma when we live in a high-tort state, and there are lawsuits that should never have gotten to be lawsuits. That makes it less attractive to take high-risk cases and harder to maintain our status with our physician partners in general.