Heroes Among Us: How Pager’s Clinical Team Supported a Client During a Natural Disaster
When mid-September 2022 rolled around, it was certain that the weather event brewing in the Caribbean would be a powerful one should it ever make landfall. And although there was hope that the front would mercifully dissipate into a tropical storm, that was far from a guarantee. As news outlets tracked its path around-the-clock, the storm only seemed to grow more stubborn, and the reality of a natural disaster soon arriving in North America as a hurricane became inevitable. The island of Puerto Rico, still recovering from the historic Hurricane Maria in 2017, was once again bracing for impact.
Hurricane Fiona finally made landfall on Puerto Rico on September 18th, almost five years to the day after Hurricane Maria. Along with it came catastrophic flooding, landslides, collapsed bridges, and an island-wide power outage, while access to drinking water, food, and medicine became more perilous by the moment. Given the extreme circumstances and the total power outage, it would have been reasonable to expect that commerce or service - of any kind - in Puerto Rico would be non-existent for the foreseeable future.
So, it is in this context that we can only begin to understand just how heroic the efforts of Pager’s Clinical Team Call Center in Puerto Rico were.
If there is any time that virtual care and telehealth services become absolutely critical, it is certainly during a natural disaster. Understanding the urgency of the moment, Pager’s Clinical Team and Call Center in Puerto Rico sprang to action and enacted emergency protocols to remain operational. Once they discovered that cell phone towers were still functioning, Pager nurses and leadership pivoted to hotspotting and generators, circumventing inoperable WiFi and power outages to connect to the necessary triage platforms.
Some nurses located in more highly-impacted areas immediately fled to work in the safety of relatives’ homes, often several hours away. Some worked from their cars due to flooding and power outages in their homes. Any secure location with cell service was viewed as a potential workstation. And while these new arrangements were coming together, two stateside nurses along with one nurse with solar power in Puerto Rico picked up the slack by working longer hours to give their teammates in Puerto Rico time to get back up and running.
The Puerto Rico Call Center Manager, Joyce Green, is thrilled with the way that it all worked out. “We felt a responsibility to keep working because we knew that people would need us. And that’s what we did. I’m so proud of the way the team came together. It was business as usual for patients, and they would not have known that anything was different on our end.”
The commitment to the task at hand and the teamwork and professionalism displayed by our Call Center in Puerto Rico made for one of the prouder moments in the history of Pager.
“You become a nurse because you want to help people. Because you care about their well-being. So, the courage our nurses displayed in those difficult moments didn’t come as a surprise to me. That’s just who they are,” Nurse Supervisor Christopher Soto beamed. “I know that our nurses have that in them.”
For as humble as the Puerto Rican Clinical Team and Call Center may be, it’s worth noting that they maintained an astonishing 100% uptime, even through the weeks after the storm, when some nurses continued to work without power in their own homes. Not a moment went by where the Call Center wasn’t accessible to members seeking care in Puerto Rico because of the resolve displayed by our nurses and staff in those dire moments.
Their willpower to maintain a high level of service was recognized with gratitude by our partner in Puerto Rico. “We are grateful to Pager who has been step-by-step with us, and for their solidarity in the face of Hurricane Fiona. Their hard work, support, and donation will allow us to continue helping our community in this emergency."
Ultimately, where Hurricane Fiona brought destruction, Pager’s dedicated clinical team saw an opportunity to flip the script and turn a story of wreckage and ruin into one of relentless resolve.