Retrained Medical Professionals (Champa Danappanavar)
Fact Checked Source: Rebecca Hersher, "Improvisation And Retraining May Be Key To Saving Patients In New York's ICUs"
On April 8, 2020, NPR's Science Deck Reporter Rebecca Hersher addressed changes happening at hospitals to address the need for more medical professionals and one of the changes in particular is retraining medical experts that are not doctors and nurses to perform similar jobs on the front lines of this pandemic.https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/08/830153837/improvisation-and-retraining-may-be-key-to-saving-patients-in-new-yorks-icus
Looking Deeper: Five Facts Checked
To analyze the claims made in this article, I have pulled out five statements to dive deeper into understand what it is saying about the COVID-19 pandemic.Robert Foronjy, the chief of pulmonary and critical care medicine at University Hospital Brooklyn, explains that even with the challenges we are facing, especially in the current time we are in, we have to keep in mind that people and patients are suffering from more than just an illness, but all kinds of problems as a result of COVID-19. Consequently, treating an ICU more sympathetically instead of just a place of sickness will provide a dose of humanity to this pandemic."It's people," he says. "You think of an ICU, maybe you think four walls, some beds. But really it's people."
As majority of hospitals transform previously other sections of the hospital into space for COVID-19 patients to reside, it shows the severity and exponential growth of people being affected by coronavirus. Not only have parts of the hospitals become dedicated to ICU space, many large buildings that have nothing to do with healthcare, like the Suburban Showplace in Novi, MI, have been transformed into ICU space."We have converted operating rooms into additional ICU space. We have converted regular medicine floors that would normally take care of much less sick patients into ICU space."
There is a severe lack in amount of resources like ventilators and PPE. As dystopian as Dr. Foronjy sounds, it could become a reality to start prioritizing lives if the number of people infected keeps increasing."What horrifies me most is a moment where I would have to decide — or someone else would have to decide — between two patients and one ventilator. And who would get that ventilator?"
With issues in amount of PPE for doctors and nurses, and as a consequence of the danger of COVID-19 itself, many medical professionals who are treating sick patients are getting sick themselves. This is why I became particularly interested in how this problem of shortages in medical personnel could be fixed. Some options implemented throughout the couple weeks have been training volunteers and rehiring retired doctors/nurses. However, volunteers cannot do too many tasks as that would be unsafe for someone unexperienced to do, and retired professionals are old and therefore more susceptible to the disease, making that option also unsafe. That is why I find the best idea to be retraining medical professionals whose job is not of upmost importance right now like dentists and surgeons who have been medically trained already."At least two nurses at University Hospital Brooklyn have severe cases of COVID-19" he says "and many others are staying home because they're ill."
As medical staff work tirelessly day and night to combat this virus, many are getting sick or quitting due to how life threatening coronavirus is. This means that as the amount of sick patient are increasing, the available medical experts to handle it are decreasing. This shows all the more how critical it is that medical professionals are being retrained and aiding in treating patients."I am exhausted," he eventually replies. "These patients are extraordinarily sick, and there are many, many many of them."
Analytic Essay
How Medical Professionals Are Retraining, Educating, and Leading To Save Lives
As the United States of America becomes the top country with people infected with COVID-19, many medical jobs that were previously utilized everyday have become unimportant in the grand scheme of contributing to the pandemic. As the traditional duties of dentists, plastic surgeons, dermatologists, urologist, and other medical professions are not in dire need to aid patients that have coronavirus, avenues are becoming open that will allow a variety of medical specialties to retrain and combat on the front lines of this situation.
New York has been the leading city in the United States since the beginning of the outbreak for number of confirmed cases. Many professionals that have some type of expertise in medicine are being retrained; many have gone from performing surgeries to learning how to monitor people on ventilator that need help breathing or from repairing broken bones/delivering babies to managing patients who are suffering from fluid in their lungs (Hersher, 2020). Once retrained, experts sign up on a dashboard with all their acquired skills, new and old, and the skills most required at the moment will be called for and they will perform their assigned job (Simmons-Duffin, 2020).
Even those that are already on the front lines of health care right now like nurses, critical care doctors, and pulmonary doctors are faced with modifications in their job duties. They now must take leadership and teaching roles to aid in training the variety of health professionals that are willing to assimilate and help out in any form. Dr. Cara Agerstrand, a critical care physician and pulmonologist at a hospital in New York, speaks on how she has “never seen a situation like this in all the time [she] has been a physician” and that she is impressed with how quickly and motivated her colleagues and those from hospitals all over the country are learning how to do different tasks to treat patients (Hersher, 2020). To take extra safety precautions, medical personnel who are experienced with a certain task have started to oversee teams of people at hospitals. Since the coronavirus is also extremely infectious, these doctors and nurses have been working at the same hospital for years have to take supplemental precautions and wear more personal protective equipment, which is an issue in and of itself (Millar, 2020).
Even though people are retraining resulting in a lot more help than when the pandemic first started, there still isn’t nearly enough. As a result, laws regarding medical professionals that are out of state or even out of country that reside here in the United States but are not licensed in the specific state they are in are becoming temporarily trivial for hospitals that desperately need help in states like Hawaii and New Hampshire. This adjustment of the law will most likely start occurring in other states soon as the number of coronavirus cases increases, and amount of medical staff decreases in retrospect. These doctors, nurses, and other experts are likewise retraining, overseeing, and mentoring to aid in healing patients. To make this process of accepting medical professionals to work happen quickly, the Federation of State Medical Boards which holds the names of physicians, where they got their degree, and where they are licensed, has granted free access to hospitals so that they can approve if a doctor is who they say they are overnight (Simmons-Duffin, 2020).
The transition that hospitals and medical staff have endured during the COVID-19 pandemic has been anything but easy, and although some have left their job as a result of risk from underlying conditions that they or a family member have, the rest have depicted a true sense of humanity and altruism. Like Dr. Agerstrand, most medical professionals feel that although they did not sign up to work in such daunting or risky conditions, they are serving a greater purpose by doing whatever it takes, even retraining in another duty, to contribute to the patients and family members affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.