WORCESTER, Mass. - Spectrum News 1 continuing to mark five years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Local hospitals were filled quite literally to the brim with sick patients for months on end. Field hospitals even needed to be opened. Creating challenges some healthcare leaders never fathomed.

"As I think about COVID, I think about how every health care system, how every governmental agency came together and worked together to solve, really, the biggest healthcare crisis of our time," said Dr. Eric Dickson, President and CEO of UMass Memorial Health. "And probably, the biggest healthcare crisis in the last 100 years."

For as challenging as the COVID-19 pandemic was for UMass Memorial Health, it also gave Dickson some perspective on the lengths they would go to save lives.

"It gave us this 'can do' attitude," Dickson said. "If the year before COVID, you had said, 'can you set up a 200-bed field hospital with piped in oxygen, and it system, radiology, a pharmacy, in eight days in a convention center, I would have said it was impossible."

It wasn't impossible. They did it twice. But what seemed impossible was maintaining ideal levels of staffing. Something Dickson says still remains an issue today. Dr. Dickson highlighted a number of people prepared to retire in 2020 who waited an extra year to help UMass Memorial Health through the pandemic. But the following summer, it led to a significant chunk of employees retiring at once.

On top of that, there was burnout from people serving on the front lines every day.

"What that did was accelerate something we knew was going to happen, the physician shortage in this country," said Dickson. "As you see the aging of the population, it means more patients. And the lower in dependency ratio, fewer births, means less people to take care of them."

COVID hasn't gone anywhere. Dickson says like the flu or RSV, it's one of those seasonal respiratory illnesses. But with a vaccine, and five years of real-time training, he says healthcare professionals are better at identifying and treating the virus which once claimed the lives of millions worldwide.

"I think we're all better epidemiologists because of COVID," said Dickson. "Even the lay public. We have all kind of tracked this and understand what happens with an outbreak like this. I think we're going to be a lot more prepared the next time something like this comes up."