Carla Ramsey from administration at Garfield Memorial Hospital wanted to do some meaningful service for hospital caregivers. She got an idea from Sevier Valley Hospital to have hospital leaders wash caregivers’ cars.
“We were right in the middle of having our parking lot fixed and construction going on, but we decided to forge ahead,” says Carla. “We sent an email to all the managers to invite them to participate and kept it a surprise from the caregivers until just a few days before. We planned to take Thursday and Friday and try to wash as many cars as possible of our caregivers, inside and out.”
It was a smashing success.
“About ninety percent of managers showed up to help,” says Carla. “They would come out and wash, and then go back in for a meeting or phone call, then come back out. We ended up cleaning more than 60 cars in two days. We vacuumed them out, wiped the inside down and then would pull them over and wash them.”
The caregivers were shocked.
“The response was so amazing, as caregivers didn’t realize that we would be doing the inside or they did not think we were seriously doing this,” says Carla. “They’d say ‘thanks’ as we’d return their keys to them, but then the next day they’d catch one of us to stop us and really thank us for doing this for them. And you know, we as leaders enjoyed the hard work. We all said we want to do this again next year.”
Garfield Memorial also did a LiVe Well Station during the car wash and caregivers were able to get their biometrics screening and get help completing the health assessments.
“The car washing definitely helped with LiVe Well metrics,” laughs Carla. “I had more than 22,000 steps on the first day and about the same on the second day.”
Amber Matthew, administrative assistant, says “Carla even donated work hours because she would’ve been going into over-time but wanted to get everyone’s cars washed. She went above and beyond, as usual. There was a lot of red, sweaty faces and all of them had great big smiles on them as they provided this service to our caregivers. They also made sure to catch the morning and night shift caregivers so that everyone felt included. I know for me, it made me feel appreciated and more engaged with my coworkers.”