Health Care Week is a time to celebrate the thousands of teammates across our system who work as one big team to provide the best health care in our region. During this week and always, we recognize how each part of our health care system is connected with the communities we serve, and we honor the significant role each member of the North Mississippi Health Services team plays in “continuously improving the health of the people of our region.”

Whether it’s providing direct patient care, supporting our local friends and neighbors, lending a helping hand when it’s needed most or being the glue that helped hold our community together during a global pandemic, this health care team continues to fiercely love and serve the people of our region.

When I think about how far our system has come from starting as the “the hospital on the hill” in the 1930s, I marvel at our vast growth as a health care family. We have grown immensely over the past nine decades because of the determination and compassion of our teammates.

We are driven by purpose, guided by our mission and values. There is nothing this team won’t do for our patients and families. From driving hours out of their way to ensure a patient is comforted with a new pet or riding their four-wheelers to work to provide care in the middle of an ice storm, our team keeps our mission and vision at the forefront of all they do.

We operate using a team-based approach to care, leveraging the mighty strength of our entire health care system to provide our best care to each patient. This means that if a patient needs a specific type of care that isn’t offered or available where they are, they likely have convenient access to this specialized care in another part of our health system right at their fingertips. It also means our team courageously faces giants, breaks barriers and builds relationships every day to ensure our patients can access the care they need.

We proudly embrace and inspire learning, curiosity and innovation to help us be the best we can be for one another and our patients. This means that those long hours our teams spend on process improvement projects or the “hard” questions they have asked because they believe in our ability to create change have a direct impact on their experience as a teammate and our patients’ experience while in our care.

We celebrate our teammates for sharing their hearts, minds, and strength, as well as empathy to ensure we keep patients and family at the center of all that we do. Their resilience, ambition, optimism, creativity, perseverance, collaboration and true “grit” keeps us connected as individuals and as a team of health care providers. Their roots and deep connections to our communities are a direct reflection of who are as a health care family.

To my teammates at NMHS – thank you for helping so many people and for making a difference in the lives of many. We celebrate you!