OAHHS Hospital Voice Fall/Winter 2020

27 Fall/Winter 2020 a strange time for all of us, how are they doing? Team Hultberg has not all been in the same place since January. I’m married, I have three kids, 21, 18, and 12. The 18-year-old graduated from high school in Alaska this year. My husband and 12-year-old also stayed behind in Alaska while I relocated here in January. Then the pandemic hit, so I didn’t see the three of them from March until June. My daughter is down here so, fortunately, I wasn’t by myself. Now, my husband and 12-year-old are in Oregon and my older son enjoyed his last summer in Alaska and has just joined us. I am glad to have them all in the same place again. Who would have thought that my carefully laid plans of going back and forth from Alaska for a few months would fall victim to the pandemic? We’re here now, we’re getting set- tled, we’re glad to be here, and we will look back on this time with some laughter at some point. I’m not sure we’re there yet! But at some point we’ll look back and reflect and find the good in it. What are you hoping for moving forward? What are your parting words for folks inside and outside the organization? I’m grateful to be there, and thanks for giving me the chance to talk about what is important to me and to reflect on the first few months. A couple of things: this is a marathon right now and with our team and for our hospitals I’m thinking about the concept of resilience. How do we cultivate resilience in ourselves and our teams so that we can continue this marathon? It’s going to involve two different buckets of work, our ongoing response to COVID, and the pre-COVID priorities that we have to turn our attention back to. That includes how we pay for health care, it includes behavioral health, it includes health equity. We need to be able to respond to the pandemic, and at the same time pay attention to these other important issues and continue to move them forward. There’s a challenge in that, a lot of work in that, and we have to take care of ourselves and our team members so that we have the resil- ience to do the work. But I’m really grateful to be here, grateful for the team, grateful for the members, that are doing this work, and for the front-line caregivers, who we show up every day to support. Becky, thank you so much. Thank you.