COVID-19 has caused another casualty in Pike County.
The Pink Ladies, volunteers who have provided valuable assistance at Southwest Mississippi Regional Medical Center since it opened in 1969, are no more.
“It’s a very sad time for us. It’s bittersweet,” said Ellen Brannan, the hospital’s director of clinical and community health education, who was the hospital’s liaison with the volunteers.
Sadness, disappointment and even a bit of anger have greeted the decision, which hospital officials communicated to volunteers a couple of weeks ago.
Adrian Tidwell, daughter of volunteer Mae Ferguson, was unhappy when she saw how her mother reacted to the news in the official notification letter from the hospital to each of the volunteers.
“My mom was really upset,” Tidwell said. “She made friends in the Pink Ladies. Now when is she going to see them? Mom was a Pink Lady for 20 years, on Mondays and sometimes Thursdays. They all did good things for people, and for the hospital ... I’m angry because I know what it meant to her.”
Ferguson said she was still upset by the decision, which removed an activity in which she could be both social and useful, but is coming to terms with it.
“They said they had no intention of letting us back in” as volunteers, Ferguson said. “They said the effect of COVID could go on for 18 months to two years. I’d be too old come back then, anyway.
“It is what it is ... life goes on, and change happens.”
With the hospital limiting access since Gov. Tate Reeves issued closure and precaution orders in March, “we haven’t been in the hospital except to close the gift shop,” Pink Ladies president Loretta Easley said.
She said she understood the hospital’s concerns about having older people on site who aren’t health care professionals and who are significantly more at risk from the effects of COVID-19.
“It’s a dangerous time for us,” Easley said. “Most of us are between 65 and 85 years old.”
That was a large part of what pushed the hospital toward its decision, Brannan said.
“It was about safety,” she said. “We don’t want to bring in this vulnerable population to perform the duties they used to do with patients. We’ve only got employees going in and out, and we’re not letting them eat in the cafeteria and don’t want people in the gift shop because we don’t want people to congregate.”
Hospital officials also had concerns about the volunteer numbers, Brannan said, with only about 25 to 27 Pink Ladies total. She said adequate staffing of the gift shop should have taken 40 people, while only about 15 of the volunteers felt comfortable working in the gift shop.
“They’re so reduced in numbers, they just can’t sustain the services they were providing,” she said. Then, “when COVID started, a number of them called and said they wouldn’t be back.”
The program already had challenges that arose from the federal Health Information Privacy Protection Act, which governs how health care facilities protect patient’s personal information.
“That whittled away at what we could let volunteers do,” Brannan said.
She said societal change was affecting the Pink Ladies and many other volunteer organizations, as well. Many volunteers when the organization started were stay-at-home mothers or housewives, she said, and the movement of ever more women into the workforce cut into the ranks of willing volunteers.
Ferguson, lamenting the loss of one of her social outlets, said the reverse is a problem, too.
“There are hardly any places to volunteer,” she said. “But that’s OK. We’ll be all right. There are so few places you can go without needing to wear a mask. It’ll be good to just stay home.”
She said she thought the members would try to get together a few times a year to stay in touch and keep up with each other.
Easley said she had enjoyed working with the group and getting to know the other members, and she would miss volunteering at the hospital.
“The hospital has been good to us, and we’ve been good to the hospital,” she said, noting donations gathered through the gift shop and the annual jewelry sale that helped to place benches and other amenities at the walking track, and funded scholarships.
“I just give praise for them letting us be there,” Easley said.
Brannan said the hospital is not foreclosing the possibility of creating another volunteer organization in the future, but given the changes in society at large and health care in particular, “it won’t be like it was.”
