Good morning!

I have been out for a few days with my family so I missed all the excitement from last week's icy weather conditions. I am aware that the forecast for Friday morning was a bit off the mark and it was only mid-morning that we learned we were looking at a “winter storm warning” instead of a winter advisory.

This experience just reminded me that when you're dealing with the weather, there are factors you can't fully account for as you think about the best way to respond.

What I want to do today is simply express my appreciation and gratitude to those of you who made the extra effort to get here despite unfavorable conditions and to do whatever was needed to take good care of our patients. The same goes for those of you who are not involved in direct patient care but keep us up and running, no matter the circumstances.   

With any weather incident like this, we will take a look at how we handled the situation and decide whether we need to adjust what we're doing to make things work more smoothly. That's part of the learning process.

The one thing I always come back to is that UMMC is a 24/7/365 operation. Barring some truly catastrophic event that requires the evacuation of patients, we don't close. All the other decisions we make about our operations have to flow from that. 

Even though we're looking at temperatures in the 70s this weekend, we will have more “weather events” ahead. I sincerely appreciate the fact that you are willing to go the extra mile - even when it's covered with ice and snow - on our journey to A Healthier Mississippi.