Patrick Ahearn, Chief Executive Officer, reflects on what he’s seen at Community Medical Center during the COVID-19 pandemic and what motivates the team to provide exceptional care.
Members of the Community Medical Center team in Toms River have been tirelessly caring for patients, and one another, as they respond to the coronavirus pandemic. Throughout it all, they have responded with strength, skill, and compassion, and shown who they truly are – heroes.
Transcription
I love the people that I work with. They are amazing people, and do great things. Their focus has been the right thing – It’s about ‘how do we take care of our patients and our community?’ And I think also people have looked at every one of our patients – I don’t want to say you get jaded, but they do this work day in and day out, and yeah, it’s meaningful, but 99% of the folks get better and go home and back to their families, etcetera, etcetera. I think this is also a wake-up call about – they were seeing their own families and the people that they were serving and helping, right? They related that ‘this could be my mom, my son, my daughter.’ Especially that’s when it gets to you, when somebody dies, they felt it very personally – not that they don’t in the past, but this is much more personal to everybody, I think, and they really related to that. There was a desperation to really take care of people and a sense of urgency. But I think what’s getting through the tragedy and the difficult times is the fact that we have really come together as a family, and we take care of each other.