UMass Memorial Health President and CEO Dr. Eric Dickson is pleading with his team leaders to voluntarily redeploy administrative staff to support the system’s coronavirus testing sites at the Mercantile Center in Worcester and New England Sports Center in Marlborough, according to an internal memo released mid Friday afternoon.
“Please start by asking for volunteers, and if we don’t have enough, we will have to start reassigning people,” Dickson wrote in a message to his senior leadership team. “This is the critical moment.”
The notice was sent just days after the network’s main campus, UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester, began strictly limiting visitors due to a continued surge that is wreaking havoc on hospitals.
Dickson wrote on Friday that he was looking to fill a variety of non-clinical roles immediately, including registrars, test kit makers, couriers and crowd management.
“Over the past two weeks, the administrative staff of Biotech, Physician Concierge Services and Marketing [sic] have been redeployed to help both sites, but it’s not enough,” Dickson said, referring to multiple departments within UMass Memorial.
He asked his staff to support clinical areas at UMass Memorial as they prepare for what he called the peak of the current rise in cases, which he said would occur in the two next weeks.
