Author: vermontnews

On National Doctor’s Day, March 30, Forbes published “15 Heroic Firsthand Stories From the Coronavirus Front Lines.” Physicians featured included UVM alumna Dr. Lynn Black, a medical director of the Respiratory Illness Clinic at Massachusetts General Hospital. Previously, she did disaster response in Haiti after the Haiti earthquake and Hurricane Matthew and in Liberia during the Ebola epidemic. A graduate of UVM’s school of nursing, Black is on the College of Nursing and Health Sciences Advisory Board. 

Since March 11, I’ve been working on expanding our ability to care for patients with possible COVID-19. We had a small clinic, the Medical Walk-In, at the start, then about a week after we expanded to a unit in what had previously been the women’s health outpatient clinic. Then the following week we opened up in a larger off-site sports medicine clinic. It’s been a continuous evolution of finding larger and more appropriate areas to take care of sick and contagious people. Our exam rooms have been completely stripped down. There are no pillows or paper on the tables. There are no chairs. There is one stethoscope that stays in the room, because once a patient is seen in there, the entire room, along with equipment, needs to be cleaned. This is usually done by the physician in the room to lessen the need for another person needing personal protective equipment. 

Other disaster settings, such as Haiti and Liberia, have been low-resource settings. That’s a very different infrastructure. I have learned in those settings how to manage a disaster situation, how to keep a team together, and how to move quickly. There needs to be a very clear chain of command on how to get things done. My biggest worry is that there are not going to be enough restrictions to make sure that we can stop this virus, and that people won’t pay serious attention to the need for social distancing and isolation. But I am choosing to be hopeful. I think that everyone is taking this seriously now and working hard. The world has experienced Spanish flu, polio and other infectious illnesses, and I do think that we’ll come out the other side of this. 

Read a story from 2018 on Dr. Black’s disaster relief work.

Source: UVM News

The COVID-19 crisis has put the spotlight on the courageous doctors and nurses battling the disease at the front lines.

But behind the scenes, another group of medical professionals is fighting its own battle with the virus, readying the equipment and outfitting the spaces medical staff need to be effective.

Nearly 39 clinical engineers and biomedical technicians in Technical Services Partnership, or TSP, a unit in UVM’s Instrumentation and Technical Services division, have fanned out around the state at hospitals large and small to do this preparatory work. 

Their focus? Helping healthcare facilities expand their inventory of intensive care rooms and isolation space for Covid-19 positive patients.

“Like ventilators and testing kits, ICU rooms are in short supply,” said Mike Lane, director of Instrumentation and Technical Services, “and they’re going to be needed.”

To meet the demand they anticipate, hospitals are creating new ICU spaces and re-purposing existing rooms. With the help of the TSP biomedical team, UVM MC just expanded  a 17-bed  medical-surgical ICU and added a 10-bed space to the emergency room.

All the rooms need the sophisticated monitoring systems medical staff rely on to treat gravely ill patients, which track vital signs like body temperature, blood pressure, pulse rate and respiratory rate. For COVID-19 patients experiencing respiratory distress, they must also measure the amount of oxygen and carbon dioxide  in the blood stream.

Installing this complex equipment, integrating it into a hospital’s electronic health record system and making sure it is in working order is a critical mission for TSP right now.

 While TSP specializes in technology — it currently oversees 70,000+ devices in 35 hospitals — it also helps hospitals with procurement, and not all of its contributions are technical.

“I talked with a customer yesterday, and one of the big issues is beds, which are also in short supply,” Lane said. Adding more hours to an already long day, Lane got on the phone with TSP’s vendors and suppliers and tracked down the beds — at a reasonable price. 

But TSP’s emphasis now is on technology. In addition to the monitoring equipment, the group is also helping the Vermont Healthcare Emergency Planning Coalition, a collaborative of hospitals and other facilities in the state that plans for disasters, acquire ventilators.

In March and April, TSP’s clinical engineers tracked down and ordered nearly 250, which they will assemble, test and ready for deployment around the state.

Source: UVM News