Working long hours in understaffed or overpopulated hospitals, frontline medical workers put their lives on the line day in and day out. Doctors and nurses treating coronavirus patients have drafted living wills, and in many cities, healthcare workers who were once treating COVID-19 patients have now died as a result of complications related to the virus.1
Still, health care workers worldwide continue to treat the virus. In some areas, doctors have left their well-staffed or under-attended hospitals, volunteering to travel to areas of mass-infection.
On Saturday, 12 doctors and 8 nurses who had already been working in COVID-19 units at the University of California San Francisco — where there have been fewer patients than anticipated — traveled to New York City to assist health care workers there.2
Before these 20 were selected, 200 of UCSF’s medical staff members had volunteered to make the trip to New York.
Many health care workers from around the world have posted photos of their faces, bruised and reddened by the extensive Personal Protective Equipment they don each shift, as evidence of the physical toll and mental strain of treating the virus. The photos also serve as a call to action, reminding viewers to stay home.
Stephen Williams, MD, Assistant Professor in Urology at The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, was recently appointed to lead his hospital’s COVID-19 Employee Health Task Force, focusing on the wellbeing of healthcare workers, Dr. Williams explained in an interview with UroToday.com.
“And when I say healthcare providers, this is all employees. So people who are working in the cafeteria, people who are cleaning our hospitals, that I think quite often we take for granted, and then going all the way to physicians … and of course, our nurses who are doing an amazing job,” Dr. Williams said. “I think we are now really appreciating, really the teamwork that comes together.”
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, other medical workers have turned their attention away from their previous research and toward COVID-19.
In a conversation for UroToday.com, Professor of Urology and Director of Urologic Oncology Fellowship at MD Anderson Cancer Center Ashish Kamat, MD, MBBS, discussed the BADAS study with Andrew DiNardo, MD, Assistant Professor at the Baylor College of Medicine and Paul K. Hegarty, MB, BCh, BAO, FRCSI, FRCS (Urol), Consultant Urologic Surgeon at Mater Misericordiae University Hospital in Dublin. The study examines the use of Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccines — which are used in the United States to treat bladder cancer — to protect healthcare workers from COVID-19. The BCG vaccine, which is used against tuberculosis, has been shown to induce nonspecific immune benefits, and the trial hopes to allow healthcare workers to receive the vaccine — which will not prevent COVID-19 entirely but could allow for a decrease in COVID-19 related injury.
Doctors and nurses have also begun to prepare in the case that they are needed to shift their attention fully — to treating COVID-19 patients directly.
In an interview with UroToday, Director of the Division of Hematology, Oncology, and Transplantation at the University of Minnesota, Charles Ryan, MD, said “We are also remembering that we are all trained as internists and so, we are reaching out and helping our hospitalist colleagues and potentially even our critical care colleagues in terms of helping to staff facilities. So there's a lot going on in terms of how we can respond clinically to this pandemic.
References:
- Siegel, R. (2020 March 26) As they rush to save lives, health care workers are updating their own wills and funeral plans. Retrieved from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/03/26/healthcare-workers-coronavirus-end-of-life/
- Plater, R. (2020 April 12). 20 UCSF Medical Workers Head Out to Help Fight COVID-19 in New York. Retrieved from: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/coronavirus/20-ucsf-medical-workers-head-out-to-help-fight-covid-19-in-new-york/2271495/
Written by: Elise Ryan, Brown University, Providence, RI