In the recent months, our UT Health San Antonio alumni family has been facing unforeseen challenges that no one could have imagined. We are honored to share the stories we have received from our alumni, and how they are helping in the fight against COVID-19.
If you would like to share your story, please email your Alumni team at alumni@uthscsa.edu.
“Since mid-March, the Medical Intensive Care Unit (MICU) at Johns Hopkins Hospital has been the first to admit COVID-19 patients locally and from the greater Maryland region. We are also the first unit to be converted into two negative pressure biocontainment units. Respiratory failure is one of our areas of expertise, so MICU nurses have been leading the efforts to educate other ICU and floor nurses on how to care for Adult Medicine patients. For the past month, a group of MICU nurses including myself have been partnering with our colleagues in our stepdown, the Medical Progressive Care Unit. We are teaching them how to prone a patient, how to assist in bedside procedures, how to manage the vent and CRRT, and how to titrate sedation, paralytics and pressors, in order for them to stand up their own ICU. We are also trialing a team nursing model that pairs 1-2 MPCU nurses and 1 ICU nurse to care for 3-4 ICU patients to accommodate the high volume of COVID-19 patients admitted.
It's all hands-on deck at this point, and I am so proud of every single nurse who adapted so quickly and works so hard to give the best care for every single person here.”
“I went to Brooklyn, New York, during the peak of COVID-19 the first week of April. I volunteered over 100 hours of my time as a critical care physician leaving my private practice for over a week.
I was one of two critical care trained physicians at Woodhull Medical Center with over 60+ critically ill intubated COVID-19 patients. Normal capacity is a 12 bed MICU. ICU’s were populated wherever oxygen sources could be found for portable ventilators.
I helped developed protocols for daily care of COVID-19 patients and provided critical care instruction to Internal Medicine interns/residents.”