On the morning of Feb. 4, Taylor Lazar and many of her coworkers in the virtual behavioral health integration team at SSM Health noticed a 10-minute meeting suddenly added between patient calls. By the end of the day, those meetings delivered unexpected layoff notices to most of the team.
Lazar had 15 minutes before she was locked out of her online workstation and was unsure what would happen to her patients.
“I’ve talked to people through that position who were actively suicidal,” Lazar said, and added, that if she and her colleagues hadn’t been there to assist people experiencing extreme distress, “I don’t know who they would have reached out to.”…