Garren Colvin, CEO of St. Elizabeth Healthcare, has informed the Northern Kentucky hospital system’s 9,007 employees that he has no intention of eliminating jobs or reducing pay despite a significant revenue decline related to the Covid-19 pandemic.
A guarantee of job security with full benefits will run through May 30, Colvin told employees late Thursday.
He’s optimistic that will carry over to June as St. Elizabeth ramps back up on lucrative surgical procedures this month with the easing of government restrictions, which had been implemented in March to preserve medical supplies that might be needed to treat patients with the respiratory illness.
Keeping the St. Elizabeth workforce intact was vital to the business plan, Colvin told me during an exclusive interview.
“This isn’t a gift,” Colvin said. “We’ve done this in preparation for what you see taking place in both Ohio and Kentucky, which is the reopening of health care and the start of the reopening of the economy.
“As soon as our elective procedures and our elective surgeries were mandated to stop, we were starting our planning process for the day when we were going to start reopening,” Colvin said. “We felt like we had to protect our workforce so they would be available for us now when we are starting this soft reopening.”
Edgewood-based St. Elizabeth’s expenses have risen along with the loss of revenue during the pandemic he said.
“We’re basically over a week’s period looking at a $10 million to $12 million operating loss,” Colvin said. “You’re going to see a huge impact on the bottom line for 2020.”
Net revenue for St. Elizabeth is about $1.3 billion annually, but the system projects being down $70 million through April because of the pandemic.
“Fortunately for us, the first 10 weeks of 2020 we’re very favorable,” Colvin said. “Our balance sheet was very strong coming into this epidemic.”
He credited Lori Ritchey-Baldwin, chief financial officer of St. Elizabeth, for helping keep the system on a strong financial footing.
The CEO is hopeful St. Elizabeth will get a significant boost in revenue with the resumption of elective surgery later this month. Such procedures had been halted by Gov. Andy Beshear as of midnight March 18 because of concerns that medical resources would need to be focused on treating a surge of patients with coronavirus disease.
The ban will lift May 13, when Kentucky hospitals and others surgery centers are permitted to resume performing non-emergency procedures at 50% of their patient volume before the pandemic began, Colvin said. St. Elizabeth and other Kentucky systems can return to full capacity May 27. A similar ban on elective surgery in Ohio ends May 1.
However, rival health systems north of the Ohio River have announced salary reductions, reduced hours or furloughs for some employees, including Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, UC Physicians, Christ Hospital, Bon Secours Mercy Health and TriHealth.
Colvin is chairman of the Kentucky Hospital Association, which along with the state health department recommended a four-phase approach to reopening medical services. That recommendation was essentially adopted by Kentucky’s governor, who mandated that hospitals must keep 30% of beds available for Covid-19 patients if needed.
“This was a great plan by the governor because you can’t really turn that switch on overnight,” Colvin said. “There’s a backlog in demand in the community, but we want to be sure we can meet that demand and coordinate those surgeries that would begin May 13 and then be basically wide open two weeks later.”
He noted that despite the backlog, some people who want elective surgery might be reluctant to reschedule because of concerns about the pandemic.
Safety precautions include requiring all patients, St. Elizabeth employees and vendors to wear masks at all times. All who enter are also screened, including taking having their temperature taken, to ensure they don’t have Covid-19.
Colvin noted that Covid-19 patients are treated only at St. Elizabeth’s Fort Thomas hospital, which has an Infectious Disease Response Team dedicated to treating coronavirus.
Surgeries are performed at St. Elizabeth’s main campus in Edgewood and at its Florence hospital.
“Our strategy through this entire pandemic has been No. 1 to protect the safety of our patients and the safety of our associates and physicians,” Colvin said.
“I want our patients to know that this is the safest place in the community,” Colvin said. “We know how to stop the spread of the disease. There are people at home today who need our services desperately. When they come through our doors, we are going to take care of them with the same efforts for safety that we have the last five weeks.
“We have been masking 100% of our associates for at least four weeks now, and we wanted to make sure we kept a safe work environment for all of our associates,” Colvin said.
“In addition to that, we wanted to make sure we could protect our associates from an economic point of view,” Colvin said.So instead of laying people off or reducing hours if their regular jobs were disrupted by the pandemic, those employees were given new responsibilities.
“What we have strategically tried to do is re-purpose all of our associates,” Colvin said. “We have athletic trainers taking temperatures at the front door. We have other individuals who are now patient sitters – because with the restrictions on visitation you are not allowed to have a visitor, so we are required to put an associate in the rooms if a patient needs someone in there around the clock.”
To maintain full pay, St. Elizabeth employees must be willing to work alternative assignments when asked. Those unwilling to work an alternative assignment must use personal time off or vacation time.
“These are the individuals who are at the front line of this war,” Colvin said. “I feel like this is the right decision – to take care of them, and their family and this community.”