‘Just trying to save lives’: What changed Rock Hill hospital CEO’s mind about vaccines?
The head of the largest and growing hospital provider in York County isn’t himself immune to questions about COVID-19 vaccines. Yet his daily experience offers perspective many people just don’t get.
“I was an anti-vaxer, in general, before this,” Piedmont Medical Center CEO Mark Nosacka told attendees Thursday morning at a business breakfast event in Tega Cay. “But I don’t want to be one of those people that’s in the hospital 20 days on a ventilator, restrained, and could’ve got a vaccine.”
Piedmont was presenting sponsor of the Fort Mill/Tega Cay State of the Community Breakfast put on by the York County Regional Chamber of Commerce. Nosacka spoke briefly, addressing the wide-ranging impacts of COVID as Piedmont operates in Rock Hill and plans for a new hospital in Fort Mill.
As a place where so many people begin and end their lives, hospitals are used to a full spectrum of experiences.
“There’s the best of times, and then there’s not so good,” Nosacka said. “COVID’s been not so good.”
There was the initial pandemic, with community lockdowns and surging need for patient care. Now the Delta variant brings a second wave.
“There’s no way we can lock people up again,” Nosacka said. “And because of Delta, we’ve got more people dying in hospitals than did in the first wave, and almost 85%, 90% of those people are unvaccinated. We’ve got nobody to my knowledge that’s died in a hospital from the vaccine. Not heard of that.”
Overwhelmingly, he said, people hospitalized for 20 days or longer are unvaccinated. Current thought is vaccination lasts about eight months, Nosacka said, and Piedmont got its first two shots around Christmas time last year. Two colleagues were involved in an antibody study. At eight months one no longer produced antibodies, he said, and the other did.
“So we rushed out and got our third shot,” Nosacka said. “To my knowledge there’s no such thing as a booster, but it’s the third shot that gives you that boost in your immunity.”
Hospital patients show trends with vaccination. Nosacka mentioned a couple in their 60s who came in with other conditions in addition to COVID. The wife was vaccinated. The husband wasn’t. She was sick seven days, while he spent more than 20 days in intensive care.
“Make your choice,” Nosacka said. “Tell people to make the choice, but we’re just trying to save lives.”
Fort Mill Medical Center
A year from now, a new hospital will open in Fort Mill. A hospital that already creates optimism amid near unprecedented strain on medical care infrastructure. Nationwide, Nosacka said, there are healthcare workers developing post traumatic stress disorder and nurses who stop practicing even as more people want and need more healthcare.
“The demands on every hospital in America have exceeded capacity,” Nosacka said.
COVID causes hospital systems to reinvent themselves, and the care they provide. And, healthcare workers have to prioritize.
“We have to run an emergency room,” Nosacka said. “We have to treat the COVID patients safely so everybody else doesn’t get sick. We have to deliver babies. And we have to do emergency surgery.”
Other areas of care sometimes have to wait.
“Everybody else we’ve got to triage and decide, can we slow down care to accommodate for all those emergencies first?” Nosacka said.
Fort Mill Medical Center could help. Initially the new Fort Mill hospital at U.S. 21 Bypass and S.C. 160, near the Peach Stand, will employ 380 people. That number should grow to 600 workers.
The site is under construction. Plans now involve a September 2022 opening.
For Fort Mill residents who followed the history of Fort Mill Medical Center, Nosacka’s comments on Thursday morning reveal a bit of the collaboration and common goal effort in healthcare brought on by COVID. Piedmont first won the right to build a Fort Mill hospital in 2006. Numerous legal challenges delayed that process, for a time even awarding hospital rights to another provider, until a state supreme court decision went Piedmont’s way in 2019.
A main opponent throughout the legal appeals process was the provider now known as Atrium Health. The same Atrium Nosacka referenced multiple times Thursday morning as a partner in antibody studies and the overall reinvention and sharing of healthcare services due to COVID.
It isn’t unlike the choice Nosacka sees facing each person with the pandemic. Will it lead to pessimism, or to virtue, generosity and support? He wants to believe it’s the latter.
“This will end,” Nosacka said. “This will end. And when we get on the other side of this, what are we going to look like?”
This story was originally published September 23, 2021 at 11:44 AM with the headline "‘Just trying to save lives’: What changed Rock Hill hospital CEO’s mind about vaccines?."
