OAHHS Hospital Voice Fall/Winter 2020

22 » A magazine for and about Oregon Community Hospitals. A CONVERSATION WITH BECKY HULTBERG A smooth transition, interrupted When Becky Hultberg was chosen as OAHHS President and CEO in late 2019, no one— including Becky—knew she would be stepping into that role just as a public health crisis gripped the nation and the world. Seemingly overnight the pandemic added a massive and complex problem to the challenge of leading the daily operations of an associa- tion in a new state with its own unique political environment. There were real concerns over a possible surge of patients overwhelming hospitals coupled with a massive revenue shortfall from the cancella- tion of elective procedures. We talked recently (on Zoom, of course) about her experience thus far, health care in the COVID era, and how this Alaska native is adjusting to life in Oregon. Becky, this is one of the most challenging times for hospitals and the country in anyone’s memory. It’s hard to believe you’ve only been here full time since January. How is it going? I would not recommend moving and starting a new job in the same year as a pandemic, especially if you work in health care! That said, I feel really grateful for a couple of things. I feel grateful that I joined the association around the first part of the year, so I had some time in the community and with the team before things got really difficult in March and our lives changed. I feel grateful for the collaborative spirit of this state. I feel confident that good decisions have been made. Now there are certainly deci- sions I might disagree with or that I might have made differently, but overall this state has come together and has made the necessary decisions to try and minimize the impacts of this pan- demic. We are not out of the woods. We have a long way to go. Our cases are on the wrong trajectory, but overall if you look at the perfor- mance of Oregon compared to other states, we’re actually doing pretty well. So I think there are opportuni- ties in this really challenging time to look at the positive things that have come out of this and to be grateful for the things that have gone really well. Hospitals in Oregon have been good partners with the state all along during the pandemic. As most people know, there was a voluntary pause of elective procedures. Talk about that decision-making process with you and the members, the impact of that decision, and how it’s gone moving forward. We had to make some really difficult decisions on a really compressed time frame at the beginning of the pandemic. Early on, we were in close touch with our counterparts in Washington state, and they were the first hotspot in the country. Seattle was the first hotspot. They told us that they were running out of personal protective equipment and that we should be very cautious and