Lessons from the Trenches

Years ago, as a Supervisor, at a different medical center, I walked in and found nine callouts. Vacations already approved and sick calls reduced half of my team that same day. We were also on a surge capacity code. The shift it looked impossible.

I didn’t try to fix it myself. I pulled the team together, explained exactly what we were facing, and we worked through it as a group. We agreed on what had to get done that shift, the basics that could not wait, and what could safely hold until the next one, based on who was actually going to be there. It worked. We got through the day, and it still amazes me to this day.

The real result came after. My manager looked at what happened and agreed that too many people should never have been approved off on the same day. From then on, vacation approval for my shift came to me.

A crisis exposes the difference between the two fast. Managing tasks means standing over a short-staffed team handing out assignments and hoping everyone keeps up. Leading people means telling them the truth about what you’re facing and trusting them to help figure out the answer.

That team didn’t need me to have the whole plan worked out before I opened my mouth. They needed to know what was actually going on and to be part of deciding what mattered most that day. People work harder and think more clearly for a plan they helped build than for one handed down to them.

Getting through that shift mattered, but the real fix came after. We caught the actual cause: a scheduling gap that let too many people be approved off at once, with no one checking whether the shift could absorb it.

A resilient staffing model isn’t just about having enough people. It’s about having a real check on how much any one shift can lose before it breaks, and someone with the authority and the visibility to catch it before the day it happens, not after. Handing that oversight to the person who runs the shift day to day, instead of leaving it buried in a separate approval process, closes the gap for good.

Keeping Your Supply Chain as Flexible as Your Schedule

The same thinking has to apply to supplies. A staffing surge and a supply shortage rarely announce themselves on a convenient schedule, and a department that can flex its people but not its product runs into the same wall from a different direction.

That means knowing your par levels for isolation and outbreak scenarios specifically, not just day-to-day averages. Par levels are the minimum stock you always keep on hand, and having a real plan for getting more product fast when a surge hits matters just as much. The department that only plans for normal days gets caught exactly when it can least afford it.

What actually got my team through that day wasn’t a plan I had ready in advance. It was being honest with the people I had, and building something afterward so the same gap couldn’t open twice.

If you’ve been through something like this, I want to hear it. Comment your own tips for handling difficult problems when everything hits at once.

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