A group of 30 healthcare heroes returned to Nashville Friday afternoon after spending a week in Asheville, North Carolina.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) — A group of 30 healthcare heroes returned to Nashville Friday afternoon after spending a week in Asheville, North Carolina.
Nashville physicians worked with more than 100 clinicians from across the country at Mission Hospital, caring for patients after the storm. When nurses arrived, they found over 350 registered patients and over 1,000 people in the waiting room.
Mission Health set up mini-marts to provide physicians with free groceries, laundry sleep and shower facilities. Many of the patients had suffered injuries from Helene. Some nurses recalled the emergency room as a hectic sight. Nurses placed patients in beds directly next to each other in pods of 12 so that doctors could more quickly move from patient-to-patient.
“[We were] coming into a team that had worked for days nonstop prior to us coming in,” assistant chief nursing officer at HCA Healthcare’s TriStar Skyline Medical Center, Bruce Mitchell, said. “We got off the bus, we put our bags into a storage room and immediately went straight into work.”
Mitchell added that he didn’t know what to expect coming to Asheville. With the support of Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), he said that they were able to support patients while also providing for nurses’ basic needs. Security teams, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) kept the environment safe for them as they helped with relief efforts.
Mitchell says his most emotional moment was finding out that there were missing nurses across Asheville.
HCA has donated $1 million to disaster relief efforts. With ongoing water issues in Asheville, they plan to preserve as much portable water for hospital use.