Unsung Heroes

Why the work you are doing matters. And why we can’t go back to normal.

Reading each day’s headlines about how COVID-19 pandemic is affecting our hospitals and health systems, two thoughts strike me. First, the frontline caregivers are obviously and appropriately being commended for their work and sacrifices. There is even an appreciation now for the environmental workers, testers, support staff – anyone who is out having contact or could be physically touching patients

But that leads me to my second thought about the coverage. There are a lot of heroes in our health organizations. Many, though, aren’t wearing scrubs.

Whether the lack of recognition is good or bad remains to be seen. I’m concerned that when all of the dust settles that the supply chain will be a scapegoat in the crisis rather than recognized for the Herculean efforts of individuals and organizations to move product to where it’s needed at unprecedented speed and volume. Will supply chain be blamed that we didn’t do more, that we were ill-prepared or equipped? I would love to believe that won’t happen, but you can already see finger pointing and second guessing in the news. Pointing fingers now or really ever is not in my opinion the right thing to be doing.

Instead, we should look to the heroes.

Supply chain teams across the nation are working tirelessly to procure supplies from sources they would never have thought imaginable, and didn’t even know existed a month ago. They’re feeling unbelievable strain knowing their clinical staffs are having to do without critical supplies and equipment. The burden and how that weighs on you when you are down in the basement doing everything you possibly can is just almost unimaginable.

It’s the supply chain – suppliers, manufacturers, supply chain professionals – that will be the unsung heroes of this fight.

We’ll get through this. But when we do, we shouldn’t go back to normal, because normal wasn’t working all that well.

A good friend of mine who is a supply chain executive said the painful truth is that we’ve never managed supply chain well. We go to conferences and attend meeting after meeting and talk about the problems. But when are we going to start solving them? How do we find the solutions?

Now that the light is shining on our contributions to healthcare, I don’t think we should go back to normal. If we go back to the way things were, we wouldn’t have learned any lessons from this.

We have to rise up and do better. How do we have greater visibility in the upstream supply chain? How do work as true partners and not just give out lip service? How do we better understand where a vendor sources products from, and how do we have greater visibility into the overall supply chain?

That’s what this is about. That’s what this could be about.

As unimaginable and awful as this situation is, let’s not have it be for not. Let’s learn from this and let’s do better, together.