Chancellor Jeffrey P. Gold, MD, thanked UNMC’s facilities management team and the incident command team for their response to the chilled water line leaks that affected the med center campus.
At Monday’s all-campus forum, Dr. Gold and Jennifer Bartholomew, associate vice chancellor for facilities management at UNMC, updated the status of repairs and efforts to fully restore chilled water services following the Thursday evening leaks.
“This has been fraught with uncertainty and inconveniences. However, everything from logistics to operations to communications to planning, it’s just been a heroic effort, literally 24-by-7, all well-organized,” Dr. Gold said.
“This type of scenario demonstrates yet again that we are so talented in terms of our resources and our ability to respond to unpredictable, unforeseen consequences such as this.”
Members of the medical center community can view the forum.
Dr. Gold said the situation required a high level of coordination between the incident command teams from both UNMC and Nebraska Medicine and complemented both teams.
The chancellor said it was critically important that service was restored with minimal or no disruption, and he offered kudos for that collaboration, which he added was done “with a lot of grace.”
By Monday night, chilled water service was successfully restored to all med center buildings impacted by last week’s water line leak, including the three remaining campus buildings of Eppley Science Hall, Poynter Hall and Eppley Cancer Institute.
In addition, Bartholomew said, the spaces flooded by the original water leaks have been remediated and will be going through their final cleaning.
In other campus topics, Dr. Gold:
- Congratulated Sarah Gloden Carlson, JD, on becoming UNMC’s permanent assistant vice chancellor and director for human resources. Gloden Carlson will continue to serve as UNMC’s chief compliance officer.
- Offered kudos to the UNMC College of Pharmacy’s Operation Immunization for administering its 15,000th flu vaccine. The college’s collaboration between the college, student health, family medicine, employee health and the UNMC chapter of the American Pharmacists Association-Academy of Student Pharmacists was developed in spring 2017.
- Highlighted the annual employee giving campaign that kicked off Monday. Dr. Gold urged all employees to participate and said donating any amount is much appreciated.
- Commended UNMC faculty who have traveled to Africa to assist with the Ebola outbreak in Uganda. “The expertise of UNMC in the area of highly infectious diseases will be called upon repetitively, and we will be asked to deploy teams of individuals to help with that guidance,” Dr. Gold said. “It’s a great privilege to be able to do that.”
- On the issue of COVID-19, the chancellor said cases are seeing an uptick nationally, although no major policy changes were forthcoming on UNMC’s campus response. He said the campus will be adding new locations and hours for on-campus COVID testing. Watch UNMC Today for details.
- Said development planning continues for the Catalyst project west of Saddle Creek Road, including UNMC’s Innovation Hub, and for the health education facility in partnership with the University of Nebraska at Kearney. On the Saddle Creek project, Bartholomew said the goal is to have that project finished and occupied within 18 to 24 months.
Discussions also continue on UNMC’s proposed Project NExT, Dr. Gold said, adding that he was in Washington, D.C., last week to meet with federal officials. In Omaha, Bartholomew said, med center officials continue to develop plans for the Innovation Design Unit that will be built within University Tower, level 6.
Dr. Gold said UNMC will continue to discuss areas of focus that emerged from campus culture surveys last fall. Those opportunities that were raised include mentoring and counseling, staff career development, small surveys to take the pulse of the campus from time to time and work-life balance. He said those areas will be part of campus goal-setting through its strategic planning discussions, which will create goals, metrics and accountability for advancing the issues for the campus’ academic and business units.
The campus also will continue discussing its challenges and opportunities to improve in the area of information management. Last month, the chancellor and campus leaders held a listening session to hear from faculty on the issue.
Finally, Dr. Gold urged med center colleagues to redouble their efforts to take care of themselves and others toward the end of the fall semester and during other periods of high stress.
Said Dr. Gold, “This is a unique environment of people that really care. We talk about serious medicine and extraordinary care. This is an amazing, caring environment, which means we take responsibility for caring for each other and for caring for ourselves.”