“No. 1 was people dying,” he said in an interview Tuesday. “No. 2 was ICU (intensive care unit) utilization and No. 3 were hospital beds, as a whole. Were we going to have the capacity to take care of these patients?”
“You looked at the magnitude of that,” Murdock added. “How do we get ventilators? How many ventilators do we need? How do we get those? Do we have enough beds? What are we going to reconfigure ourselves to look like when things really get bad?”
“It taught us a lot about ourselves as an organization,” he said. “It taught us about some of the future of health care, some of the things we may have to deal with that we’ve never dealt with before in our entire careers.”
Today, Murdock is readying to take the helm of the Syracuse VA, leaving his Oakwood home of 21 years. He will assume his new role July 30.
“I’m excited about the adventure, but it’s a lot,” Murdock said.
The Dayton VA has more than 2,700 employees and 40,000 enrolled veterans.
He was named director of the Dayton VA in February 2020, taking the helm of a VA campus with which he was already familiar.
In Dayton, Murdock has served as associate director and acting director. He was named acting director in the spring of 2016 when former director Glenn Costie temporarily took over the Cincinnati VA, which at the time was under scrutiny. (Costie returned to Dayton in October 2016.)
When he assumed the top office at the Dayton VA, Murdock’s career had included stints at the Cincinnati and Chillicothe VA systems, and his career included time as health system specialist in the surgical service in Dayton.
The pandemic altered the medical landscape dramatically.
“Things like the vaccinations, the masking protocols,” Murdock said. “Initially, what we were going to do and what we weren’t going to do, surgeries and procedures. When was it safe to move forward?”
Telework and telemedicine — working with employees and care providers online — “exploded in many ways,” he said.
His time in Dayton included overseeing monthly telephone town halls with patients to gauge their satisfaction and the offer of Enhanced Use Leases on certain underutilized buildings on the Dayton VA campus off West Third Street.
That weren’t the only milestones of his 18-year Dayton career. Today, the local VA is approaching the screening of its 25,000th veteran for PACT Act benefits. (As of Tuesday morning, the local campus had screened 24,698 veterans.)
That number represents only initial screenings, a VA spokeswoman said. If it’s shown a veteran may have been exposed to toxins, there will be other screenings.
The initial screening involves a series of questions, including assignments and duty stations, in an attempt to determine if a veteran has been exposed to toxins.
“It tells me that we’re doing a very thorough job for every veteran who walks through the door,” Murdock said.
Dayton VA Associate Director Jennifer DeFrancesco will be acting medical center director during the search for Murdock’s replacement. She has been associate director since October 2020.
“We try to learn and improve as an organization each day, and we have a tremendous number of leaders in this organization that are fully engaged every day,” Murdock said.
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