Hands Around Sumter
Date: March 26, 2007

From behind-the-scenes support personnel to front-line clinicians, healthcare workers’ sense of compassion and urgent desire to respond in times of need is both inspiring and encouraging.

When Floyd co-workers learned that colleagues in Americus were in desperate need of assistance after a tornado heavily damaged Sumter Regional Hospital and left 35 of Sumter’s 700 employees without homes, the response was swift and generous.

On March 1, Sumter Regional was struck by a tornado spawned from the same storm that left 8 teen-agers dead and destroyed an elementary school and high school in Enterprise, Ala. Although forced to evacuate their 143-bed facility, Sumter Regional has demonstrated a courageous resiliency by continuing to provide care to the families of Americus in a tent erected in a nearby parking lot.

When VHA Georgia announced it was giving $5,000 to help Sumter rebuild and another $5,000 to Sumter employees, Floyd responded with matching donations to help our colleagues, but our employees wanted to do more.

In response, Floyd’s Public Relations department developed High Five: Hands Around Sumter, a campaign to give Floyd employees an opportunity to help the South Georgia hospital an the employees who work there. To give, employees go to GreenLink, Floyd’s intranet communication link, provide basic information and choose how much money, in $5 increments, they would like to donate.

One day after publicizing the need, SPIRIT, Floyd Healthcare Foundation’s employee giving arm, decided to donate $1,000 to Sumter and to help raise more funds by soliciting more High Five donations person-to-person throughout our organization. Since last Tuesday, Floyd employees have given over $3,600 to help meet Sumter’s needs, including the SPIRIT gift, and the number is continuing to rise.

This week, Public Relations and SPIRIT members will begin placing a hand print on a wall of our cafeteria for each $5 donated to Hands Around Sumter. Combined with photos of the devastation in Americus, it will serve as a reminder to us and our customers that Floyd cares.

The culture at Floyd is built around Service Standards developed by Floyd employees a decade ago, standards like attitude, responsiveness, communication and co-worker commitment. The generosity extended to people that most of us have never met, in a town 200 miles away, is a testament to heart of our organization.

It is what we hope others would do for us, if we were in a similar situation.

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