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