Delivering Healthcare During the Covid-19 Pandemic Lockdown
By ANNIKA PATEL
Introduction:
March 2020 took the world by storm when a global lockdown was announced due to the outbreak of Coronavirus, or COVID-19. Every aspect of this world was changed as a result; things from education, politics, normal everyday life, and especially healthcare. New sanitation protocols were announced for everyone, including mandatory masks, 6-ft social distancing, and a huge emphasis on washing hands. Within healthcare facilities, even more sanitation and safety protocols were introduced in order to protect the patients, workers, and all families. Nursing homes in particular experienced hefty numbers of outbreaks and their prevention control was at its peak.
Mital Patel has been a nurse for more than 22 years. Having her Masters in Nursing shows her experience through the healthcare industry as she’s worked in hospital settings, the classroom as a professor, and now at an Assisted Living/Nursing Home facility. There, she is a Nursing Supervisor who oversees all resident care and the nurses. Due to her extensive experience, she has a clear understanding of how healthcare has now changed as a direct result of the Covid-19 Pandemic. She also has first hand experience of the outbreak crisis that emerged within nursing homes
Audio: Interview with Mital Patel Recording
Interview with Mital Patel
Transcript:
AP: So first, what was it like working in healthcare before March 2020? You said you worked in a hospital so kinda what were the procedures you had to follow.
MP: It wasn’t so rigid and, you know, strict as far as infection protocols and stuff like that. Or education for nurses and the staff in the hospitals wasn’t so frequent like before. Of course we had our procedures and policies as far as doing some kind of invasive procedures for our patients, but to protect the residents and protect ourselves so that we don’t bring this stuff home to our families, that was something that we had never thought about until something like the virus hit.
AP: When the pandemic hit, and when we were first initiated to go into lockdown, do you remember where you were, what you were doing, kind of how you reacted to the whole news?
MP: You know, local news I watch but if I wanna know what’s going on in the world I watch CNN or MSNBC, something like that. They were talking about this lockdown in China and I didn’t really think much of it, I mean we’ve got the MARS, and the SARS, and all this other stuff, Ebola. When the lockdown hit, I was actually at the nursing home and our administrator called and said ‘okay we’re going into lockdown mode’ so at that point going into a lockdown mode in a nursing home is totally different than going into a lockdown mode in a hospital. I didn’t know what the process was in the nursing home. So, for me it was more about informing the residents’ families that they can’t come and go as they please, the nurses needed to now have temperature checks on their residents more frequently, we had to all wear N95 masks, goggles, just full PPE.
AP: And so, you said that your facility went into immediate lockdown, so throughout the rest of the pandemic how did your administrator, how did people around you, how did you learn more about the pandemic as it progressed?
MP: Um so our administrator, I’d have to say, would hear word-of-mouth from other facilities, he also looked at the CDC website which is the website that we go to, the World Health Organization website, as far as CNN those kinds of news media. We also looked at the Department of Health as far as New Jersey, the Board of Education, and The Infection control. How to change our procedures based on their guidelines, and that’s what we did. It changed so much to a point where we would now have temperature checks on everybody, all our residents needed to get swabbed, every other day, for Covid. We were waiting for the vaccines to come out. So a lot of news media, but the right sources.
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