Alumni on the Frontlines Joni Johnson ('82) helps with local efforts to battle COVID-19 By Natalie Hayden, Director of Advancement
Tell us a little bit about yourself: I am married to Thomas Sims and have three children, two sons and a daughter, and four grandchildren. Once I finished high school, I went straight into nursing school at Kentucky Wesleyan College where I graduated in 1985 with my Associate Degree in Nursing. I began my nursing career at Our Lady of Mercy Hospital in 1985, then in 1986 I was hired to work on a surgical post-op unit at Daviess County Hospital (currently known as Owensboro Health Regional Hospital). In 2005, I graduated from Western Kentucky University (WKU) with my MBA and in 2013, I obtained my MSN, also from WKU. My nursing background consists of surgical postop, orthopedics, pediatrics, oncology, and behavioral health. At Owensboro Health Regional Hospital, I served as Nurse Manager of a surgical post-op unit for 10 years, followed by Director of Medical/Surgical Services for 14 years, and currently serve as the Chief Nursing Officer.
the front lines. When COVID-19 started, we were hearing what was happening in other countries and we started having regular meetings, learning about the virus, the impact it was having, and talking about how we should begin preparing for the pandemic if it were to hit the US. Then the ‘if’ it were to hit, quickly changed into ‘when’ it was going to hit. When COVID-19 got close to Kentucky, the influx of questions and on-the-fly decisions that needed to be made were overwhelming and to complicate things, guidelines were changing by the minute. One minute we would make a decision and ten minutes later that decision might be outdated; it was so hard to keep up. Decisions were changing so quickly mainly because this was a new virus. Nobody really knew what to expect…all we knew was that it was coming, it was rapidly spreading, it was potentially lethal, and it was totally unpredictable. Through all of this whirlwind we were doing the best we could to keep our team members informed but you can imagine how difficult that was with everything changing so quickly. After a few crazy days, our system Chief Medical Officer, Dr. DuFrayne, took the lead and things started to fall into place. We developed a leadership steering committee with daily decision-making meetings and daily updates. We opened an operations center for centralized communication. We put up triage tents outside of our Emergency Department (ED) to reduce potential exposure to those who were not being seen in the ED for COVID-19-like symptoms. We developed a surge plan that involved working with our Daviess County Emergency Management team. We developed a care team structure and education plan for expanding critical care capability beyond our critical care unit. We identified locations and units for where we would admit COVID-19 patients. We installed equipment to convert additional rooms into negative pressure. We developed processes to minimize the use of personal protective equipment (PPE). We implemented telemedicine in the clinics and the capability to tele-visit with our patients. We relocated units. We even secured a unit for COVID-19 inmate admissions. In just a couple of weeks we implemented processes that normally would take months to years to get up and going!
"Nursing has been a very rewarding career; I’m glad God sent me down this path."
Why did you choose healthcare? This might sound corny, but for me healthcare was a calling; I can’t describe it any other way. I remember Christmases when I was young, my sisters might have asked for a barbie or a baby doll, but I wanted medical stuff. One year for Christmas I got a visible man and woman; one year I got a microscope… Medicine and anatomy intrigued me when I was a kid. My dad was a hunter. I would help him field dress the deer and dissect pretty much anything he brought home …doves, squirrel…I thought it was so cool. As far back as I can remember, I wanted to work in healthcare. When I was a little girl I actually wanted to be a surgeon, but I also had the crazy idea that I wanted to drive a semi-tractor trailer. So, I put the two together and decided to be a traveling surgeon with a mobile clinic who operated on those less fortunate. But… life happens, and our plans don’t always work out the way we intended so instead of becoming a surgeon I decided to become a nurse. Nursing has been a very rewarding career; I’m glad God sent me down this path.
What has it been like to work through this pandemic of COVID-19? It has been crazy and so surreal. I am not directly on the front lines, but I serve as a support to those who are working
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THE GREEN AND WHITE n SUMMER 2020
What training prepared you for this? No one is ever prepared for a pandemic. When COVID-19 hit the U.S. and Kentucky, we
