Business View Caribbean | July 2022

83 BUSINESS VIEW CARIBBEAN VOLUME 9, ISSUE 7 well, however. There still appears to be a strong appetite to continue to come to work in Bermuda, and we benefit from that. “The workforce challenge in healthcare, however, existed before we had COVID-19. And it’s not just in nursing, it’s across the panoply of all the services and specialties, and particularly the technical services in laboratory, imaging, and pharmacy, as well. There is a global shortage of professional staff in healthcare, and we are part of that global economy. So we have to do our best to position ourselves strongly.” BVC: How has BHB adapted over the last two COVID years? Dr. Richmond: “In March of 2020, the world had a collective heart attack and had to deal with an incredible challenge to people, services and economies. Bermuda was no different. Being an island jurisdiction, the Bermuda government proactively determined quite early on about how to manage their borders in defence against this threat. The closure of our international borders in March 2020 gave us protection in terms of the footfall landing in Bermuda, and a strong testing regime was established early on – something which holds true to this day. The country went into a National Emergency lockdown for four to six weeks, which meant there were huge BERMUDA HOSP I TALS BOARD (BHB) compromises made during the initial period of trying to hold back the tide. The barriers that were put up were effective, however, and in the first year of the pandemic we did not experience a major surge of cases in the hospital. This made a huge difference for us to be able to prepare and cope with the much bigger waves we experienced in 2021. “At BHB, we were obviously concerned as to what might be coming our way. We did pretty well in terms of getting ahead of some of the challenges and being proactive. We were also lucky. Before the pandemic we had ordered a large stock of new beds as part of our usual lifecycle replacement programme. They arrived in May, ensuring that if we were to be overrun with very sick patients that we would have additional beds to accommodate them. In other areas we had to work very hard. We were very aggressive in trying to secure our personal protective equipment, drug and consumable pipeline and increase our reserves to ensure we had a strong path into getting all of the stocks of medication that we needed. “We also looked at how we were going to redefine our hospital flow, and the ability to undertake elective, more routine activity was curtailed for the duration. We prioritized the critical and the emergency as a matter of