The Patient Voice: Rev. Michael Coley
Cross-departmental teamwork can be easy to plan on paper, but until the team players get a chance to put that plan into practice, the process can be difficult to visualize. The physicians, nurses, and administrators at Sumter Regional Hospital in Americus, Ga., got that chance when a tornado struck on March 1, 2007.
The Rev. Michael Coley, who sits on the hospital's board, saw the facility’s teamwork in action the night of the tornado. Coley and his wife, Linda, were at the hospital visiting their daughter, who had just given birth to their granddaughter the day before.
When the storm hit the hospital, Coley said it sounded like a train. “The suction slammed the door shut. Then it sounded like someone shot the window out with a shotgun,” he says. “It was really scary for a minute. There was glass flying, so much debris flying. We huddled together in the corner and prayed.”
After a few terrifying moments, the tornado passed and Coley and his family emerged from their room to find water everywhere. “When we walked into the hallway, the ceiling was falling and there were wires hanging,” he says. “We trekked our way down the hallway. There were people moving out into the hallways, and they looked like they were in a daze, like they couldn’t believe what was happening.”
Coley said the nurses quickly and calmly stabilized the situation. Soon after the storm passed, emergency personnel arrived and directed patients to safety until they could be evacuated to another hospital about 40 miles away. Coley said throughout the process, the nurses, doctors, hospital administrators, and emergency personnel kept everyone abreast of the latest developments and made sure patients were stabilized. “The hospital staff was phenomenal,” Coley says. “The staff dealt with it as they had been trained to. It was amazing to see how calm they were. They were looking out for the patients, bringing them bottled water, food, blankets. They were really very helpful.”
The hospital employees weren’t the only ones who calmly dealt with the chaos. Coley’s one-day-old granddaughter, Taylor, never even batted an eye. “The baby didn’t even wake up,” he says. “She slept through the whole thing.”