An Extraordinary Team Delivers Extraordinary Service

It took a committed, hard-working and loyal BayCare workforce to achieve the goal of reaching the top quintile in clinical quality nationally and to maintain that high level of achievement during a pandemic. That BayCare team members did so is a testament to how thoroughly they’ve embraced a principle basic to BayCare as a not-for-profit health care provider: We exist to serve our community, and our patients and customers deserve our best.

BayCare’s more than 30,000 team members and providers, like all Americans, were confronted with tremendous change in 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic—at home, at school, in their relationships and social lives, but also at work. And the changes happened almost overnight when the virus appeared in March 2020. Frontline physicians, nurses, respiratory therapists and others who cared for COVID-19 patients in our hospitals or in patients’ homes, showed up and faced down fear of catching the virus so that our sickest patients could get the care they needed. The team at BayCare Laboratories faced an avalanche of work, performing a stunning 12.6 million lab tests in 2020, including processing samples from BayCare facilities and community testing sites.

Many BayCare team members were shifted to different roles or into new work environments to meet the challenges the pandemic created for the health system. They staffed coronavirus testing sites. They performed temperature checks at hospital entrances. They scrambled to convert nonclinical spaces into areas where patients could be served. They fielded thousands of calls in our call centers, responding with reliable information and comforting words to residents’ concerns about the virus. When supplies of protective equipment ran low, they volunteered for duty in a large mask-making operation set up at BayCare headquarters, or they figured out an efficient, assembly-line process to produce face shields for their clinical colleagues. Other team members worked their regular jobs, though often remotely, and carried out the work and projects that had been planned for 2020 before the pandemic arrived.

Serving the community in good times and bad is our job as the region’s largest health care system.

BayCare rewards its team members’ hard work, initiative and innovation with competitive salaries and benefits, tuition assistance for certificate and college study, and mentoring and leadership programs for those who want more responsibility. An Employee Assistance Program offers support and financial assistance for team members or their dependents who need help, and an innovative wellness program provides effective ways for team members to make or maintain healthy changes in their lives.

In 2020, BayCare was named a People Companies That Care® by Great Place to Work and People magazine for supporting team members and the community during the pandemic. BayCare also was named to FORTUNE’S 100 Best Companies to Work For® 2020, Best Workplaces in Health Care and Biopharma™ 2020, Best Workplaces for Millennials™ 2020, Best Workplaces for Women™ 2020, and Great Place to Work’s Best Workplaces for Parents™ 2020. BayCare also was recognized in 2020 for the sixth year in a row on the Top Workplaces list by the Tampa Bay Times newspaper. That recognition is based entirely on employee surveys.