Normally at this time of year, you would receive a Montage Health annual report from me.

But this is not a normal year.

With lives turned upside down by the COVID-19 pandemic, 2019 seems like a million years ago. Rather than report on last year, we want to share with you what it’s been like at Montage Health in the last months, navigating a shifting daily landscape, sometimes exhausted, at other times exhilarated, and always focused on serving our patients and our community with expertise, confidence, and compassion.

In the first months of 2020, as the coronavirus tide moved toward the U.S. and California, we began preparing for its inevitable arrival in Monterey County. We went into our formal “incident command” mode on March 3, and in the days that followed, erected a triage tent, began building up our stock of protective gear, ratcheted up some services, and scaled back others. We wanted to be able to both care for the community and to calm its fears.

As you read this report, I hope you’ll get a sense of why I’m so proud of all the women and men I have the privilege of working with. When faced with uncharted territory, they’ve relied on their individual capabilities and drawn from each other, as well as experts from around the world. They’ve worked as a team, taking on challenges we’ve never faced before. That pride is tempered by loss — a loss of normalcy, of economic security for too many, of connection to one another, and hardest of all, loss of life. As a healthcare system, we have been fortunate, if you can use that word, to have experienced relatively few COVID-19 cases, so far. Yet the impact has still been deep — emotionally and financially; many of our employees experienced significant loss of income as their hours were cut when services were canceled to make way for a potential surge. As I write this, we are returning to our new normal, but what is “normal” will undoubtedly change again.

This report captures just one moment in time, in one place. Whatever comes next, we are committed to working through it, learning from it, and, with your continued support, coming out stronger for all of you.

Steven Packer, MD
President and CEO