Interview Story - Took Initiative

This experience was life-altering… It was a bright sunny Saturday in New Orleans, although we had beautiful weather, there was a hurricane brewing in the Gulf of Mexico that was heading for a landing in coastal Florida per Friday night local news.

I received a call from my brother who was on vacation, inquiring about our evacuation plans for Hurricane Katrina, which he says according to the new weather report was headed directly to New Orleans. Having no idea what he was talking about, I turned on the news. He was right the hurricane had changed paths and was now headed towards us. The direction from the local government was that residents should evacuate – at this point it was voluntary.

I called the CEO of the behavioral health hospital where I was the DOP (director of the pharmacy). With the imminent hurricane, I wanted to make sure that my patients and my staff would be properly taken care of. I asked her how we were going to proceed with evacuating patients from the hospital.

She was at the salon getting her hair colored and had no idea about the sudden shift in the trajectory of the hurricane. She asked me to allow her time to look into it and call me back. Upon return call, she contacted hospital personnel and implemented our evacuation policy for the hospital. Patient’s families would be given the opportunity to pick up patients who were in-patient. Those who remained hospitalized would be our responsibility to evacuate to another hospital out of harms way.

I called in my staff, who did not normally work on weekends, and asked if they could come in to assist. We would need to fill a 10-day supply of medication for each patient as we were not certain of where we would be evacuating patients and how many days they would remain away from home. Once we obtained the census, the process began.

We went through drug profiles and provided a 10 day supply of medications to each patient. A large percentage of patients would require additional sedatives for the bus ride to “wherever”. As the day progressed, the voluntary evacuation became a mandatory evacuation.

My staff pharmacists and technicians expressed a need to leave to tend to their family’s evacuation needs. I completely understood, as my family remained at home awaiting my arrival to get on the road that would soon be closing. I was the Director and would stay until the job was complete. At approximately 10 PM, with help from nurses and all of the leadership team, we completed the task at hand, loaded patients onto buses to comply with the mandatory evacuation. I went home and prepared to evacuate as my family awaited.

We evacuated to Memphis, TN. Once I arrived in Memphis, I placed a call to my supervisor, to inform my supervisor of my whereabouts. I then learned that the patients had been evacuated to Memphis as well to a hospital less than 3 miles from where I resided. I was asked if I could continue to serve our patients who had been evacuated and report to work. By now Katrina had recently occurred and we had lost everything. I did not have time to process the effects of it all yet. But I knew there were patients who could benefit from a service that I could provide, so I agreed to go into work providing continuity of care to our patients who were away from home and their families.