On April 27, a rare E-F5 tornado raged through rural Alabama, killing dozens of people and leveling towns in minutes. Houses and schools and churches were reduced to matchsticks; trees were uprooted; cars were blown away like deadly toys. The devastation was unthinkable.
But in the darkness, a bright spot shone.
In two National Guard tents pitched amid the rubble in Hackleburg, a town that the Red Cross declared about 75% destroyed, Keith Morrow, D.O., and his staff continued to provide healthcare to the shell-shocked survivors.
Despite losing his two medical offices, one in Hackleburg and the other in a nearby town called Phil Campbell, the family practitioner felt he had a responsibility to help care for the community where he's been practicing medicine for 25 years.
"When you're the only healthcare provider in town and so many people were left with nothing," he says, his voice trailing off. "Both towns lost their only clinic and their only pharmacy."
Now, Morrow is being honored as 2011 Country Doctor of the Year by Staff Care, a temporary physician staffing firm. The award recognizes America's outstanding rural medical practitioners. Morrow was also named a "Hospital Hero" by Russellville Hospital for his post-storm work. He will be honored by the Alabama Hospital Association in February.
Just days after the tornado destroyed his clinics, Morrow began providing free care in National Guard tents and a donated camper. Pharmaceutical reps donated medicine and other supplies.
"The first week or two we were just here trying to help," he tells HealthLeaders. "We didn't have anything to even make charts out of, so we weren't exactly trying to get a chart where you could bill."
In fact, the tornado destroyed more than just the medical offices themselves. All of the patients' medical records were lost too.
"All the way up into Tennessee, people found pieces of records," Morrow says. The clinics also lost two X-ray machines, as well as the only bone density machine in the county.
"We're still trying to find a way to be able to replace that," Morrow says of the bone density machine. As for their complete blood count machine, "we still can't even find it," he says. "We don't know where it got blown to."
The Hackleburg clinic operated out of tents for several weeks, treating and counseling residents and clean-up workers and providing familiar faces to people who'd just lost everything.
"People didn't even have cars. Their cars were damaged and destroyed, and they'd come by to get insulin or Zocor or antibiotics," says Morrow. "So we were here initially just to treat anybody that needed treatment."
Then, a local Pepsi distributor donated an 18-wheeler trailer that he'd retrofitted into a makeshift doctor's office, complete with bench seating, an exam table, a nursing area for blood draws and shots, and six 4x4 cubicles for patient visits.
"It's actually been pretty miraculous, as far as we're concerned," Morrow says of the 53-foot-long trailer. "I have a wonderful staff?we've gotten closer, so to speak, because every time you move you bump into somebody."
That trailer has been the status quo for the past five months, where they've seen patients "from 2 to 92," says Morrow, treating everything from broken bones and cuts immediately after the tornado to chest colds and early pneumonia. For patients who can't climb the trailer's steps, Morrow does "car calls," seeing people right in their cars.
"A country practice is different, so you do what you have to do, what you need to do," he says.
Morrow says his newly rebuilt clinic should be operational by the beginning of the new year. Although five months in the trailer hasn't been easy, it's a small price to pay for having survived the devastation.
"Everybody here either had friends or family that were somehow affected by the tornado," he says. "Everybody's been amazingly patient. I think we're just all so glad to be alive."
Morrow is also in the process of starting a nonprofit organization that will raise money and provide support to help medical clinics operate and rebuild after natural disasters.
The 55-year-old Morrow admits that "for about three seconds" he considered using the insurance money to reopen a smaller practice, maybe slow down a little bit.
"But then you look around and that's not the right thing for me to do," he says. "This is where I belong."
Alexandra Wilson Pecci is an editor for HealthLeaders.
