I received a phone call a few days ago from an IDF Home Front Command officer. She informed me that I had been breaking the law, saying: “You’re not allowed to talk to patients. Did you know that? It’s not part of your job as a local authority.”
I’m not sure if my heart even skipped a beat, as the phone immediately rang again. This is how it’s been in recent months. A resident was on the other line. He was having difficulty breathing and he asked for help. I stayed on the line with him, calming him down while immediately sending an ambulance. When I asked him why he didn’t simply call his healthcare provider hotline, he explained that he had waited 10 minutes on the line with the HMO before deciding to hang up and call me.
I have no medical training, and a year ago, I didn’t imagine residents calling us with breathing problems. But when I got this phone call, I realized how much the residents trust us and how much responsibility we have. We have to produce solutions and be fully alert at all times, even if I’m dealing with tasks which deviate from my official role as CEO of the municipality.
One can hardly understand how complex the traffic light model is for small local authorities like us. When you have less than 10,000 residents, the math configuration works less well. If we start a week with 19 patients in six different families, we’re already categorized as “orange”. A new sick resident today and two more tomorrow turn us into a “red” city just like that.
From the beginning, we realized that we had to manage this on our own. I asked a police representative and a welfare representative to attend an urgent meeting. We had a mission to reduce morbidity. We needed to explain, enforce and break infection chains. We needed to give infected residents solutions while maintaining a daily routine of some sort.
Our authority as a municipality is pre-defined and rather limited. We can’t, for example, knock on a resident’s door and force her to quarantine. But our power is different: just as we project responsibility when we answer the phone at any hour, we now ask our residents to do the same. Responsibility needs to be towards me the individual, as well as towards my neighbors and community.
When a resident is infected, I conduct an epidemiological investigation myself (I underwent training with six other representatives from the regional council). Then I transfer the authority over to the resident herself. I ask that she stay in isolation, go through her schedule from the past few days and call everyone she physically met. We have acted on our own authority – maybe even a little beyond, but I’m confident that that’s what we need to do now.
It’s clear to me that we can do this because we are a small municipality. And we have people working around the clock, reinventing and expanding their roles and ours. But it’s important to understand: burnout accompanies all this work. I feel responsibility for them, as well, because along with sticking to the task, all this intensity has a price. Therefore, with the mayor’s approval, we decided to have the team undergo an accompaniment and problem-solving process with MAOZ. The objective was to strengthen employees’ resilience with this endless intensity and help them keep their heads above water.
Our phones didn’t stop ringing during the accompaniment. The resident I did an epidemiological investigation for called me at one point. She recalled another meeting she had had and asked that we update the relevant people to quarantine, as well.
The phone calls keep coming. It’s not that we don’t have a municipal hotline – the residents just prefer to call directly. This is how it is when the residents shop at the supermarket with us, send their kids to the same school we send our kids to, and so on. I’m part of my community. And I don’t think we’re alone on this – this is what local authorities look like today.
So if I’m summoned to an inquiry committee after this is all over, I’ll stand with dignity and say that I did everything I could for my residents during the emergency. And sometimes a little more.