10/13/2024
Thank you to everyone that reached out following the devastation of Hurricane Helene. Our crew at Vital Care of Asheville made it out relatively unscathed. We have an amazing dedicated staff that pulled together during previously unimaginable circumstances for our mountain communities.
Like most of the region, we were without water, power, and internet for the week following the storm. We worked closely with our regional providers and are proud to say we continued to service 100% of our acute care patients. Here's what that looks like:
*Our pharmacy was running on generator power, so we only had a handful of working outlets. Mazes of extension cords and power strips kept our computers, printers, and phones powered.
*Toilets were flushed using water collected from the pond in front of the neighboring Deerwood community.
*Internet was only accessible intermittently via mobile hot spots and neighboring WiFi connections.
*We were huddled around limited power and internet without air conditioning and minimal food and water. Shout out to our 7 month pregnant nurse practitioner for enduring the conditions in order to keep our patients serviced!
*We quickly discovered the air conditioning component of our cleanroom was not tied into the generator power appropriately. Given the enclosed space and a big IV hood running continuously, our temperatures rose outside of acceptable limits. We reached out to Mission Hospital and they graciously agreed to let us use one of their IV hoods in their cleanroom. This allowed us to continue compounding IV antibiotics and other life saving medications for our patients throughout WNC. We cannot thank our colleagues at Mission enough. Also thanks to the NC Board of Pharmacy for allowing this setup and working with us once power was restored to ensure safe operations.
*We needed an additional foot-operated Baxter repeater pump to hook up sterile water bags for handwashing in the anteroom. We reached out to Ben at Vital Care of Houston and we had his pump in our pharmacy within 24 hours! FedEx from Houston to a liaison in Winston-Salem, meeting another liaison in Hickory, then another hand-off in Marion with one of our pharmacists before finally arriving in Asheville.
*We faced the same challenges as everyone else regarding lack of fuel, inaccessible roads, courier closures, and FedEx shipping outages. We set up distribution hubs at various locations for patients that could access those sites. Big shout-out to Harris Hospital Outpatient Infusion Center for being one of those sites. Other deliveries were made to the Charlotte area, and further distributed to patients in the Winston-Salem and Greensboro area. Other packages for patients reaching all the way to the Outer Banks were driven to our nearest servicing FedEx hub in South Carolina for overnight Priority shipping. Other deliveries were taken directly to affected patients that could not make it out of their homes, including a patient living on top of a mountain just east of Marion in a camper keeping his milrinone pumps charged on a gas generator.
*After crawling to the end of the first week, we emailed a different internet service provider that services some of the other businesses in our building. The owner of ERC Broadband reached out almost immediately, on a Saturday, and offered to come out the following day. Sunday afternoon, he showed up, and got us connected to their fiber internet service. With all of our systems and printers requiring our own firewalled network for normal operation, this was a game changer and I'm eternally grateful for Brad and everyone at ERC that made that possible. Also thanks to Loud Technology for helping to get our firewall reestablished under the new IP address and setup.
*Thank you to Dr. Jenny Jackson next door at Asheville Pediatric Dentistry. They were the source of some internet and offered the shower in their space once water returned. That allowed some of our staff the first shower in going on a week since the hurricane hit.
*Thank you to our families for enduring the long and complicated hours it required to continue servicing our community.
As you can see, we would not have survived without our staff and community support pulling together to make all this happen. We're blessed to have the best in the business and Vital Care of Asheville is proud to continue servicing some of the best and bravest people in the world.
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