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On the Front Lines of COVID-19
“Sending a healthy baby and mom home together is the best thing in the world. It’s really a bright spot in all the despair we are confronting with COVID-19.”
“There’s a ‘new normal’ every day. In the lab, you need to be clever and you need to think ahead. You figure out what you need and you just make it happen.”
KARYN SOLKY, MD,
MARGIE MORGAN, PhD,
clinical chief, Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology
medical director of Microbiology in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine
Cedars-Sinai healthcare professionals show up every day to fight COVID-19. They quickly yet effectively adapt to ever-changing guidelines about the nature of the disease and its management. As infection rates soar and ebb, clinicians and other team members reconfigure their roles and the hospital’s physical landscape. They seek the best treatments, comfort families—and care for patients, themselves and their colleagues. From the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) to the pharmacy, every Cedars-Sinai employee plays a critical role in a unified force—but their experiences are unique. Here, several share their perspectives from the pandemic front lines. “I can’t say enough about how heroic our frontline staff has been. We have faced unprecedented challenges with everything from patient care to testing to supply chain management—all evolving very rapidly. In just a few weeks, we produced more than 60 protocols to define safety practices in many areas—from admissions to labor and delivery. I’m really proud of how all this was developed so quickly from scratch in a multidisciplinary way.” JONATHAN GREIN, MD,
director of Hospital Epidemiology
22
“A lot of this started over Passover and Easter, so we put up signs in ICU windows because we couldn’t go into patient rooms. Some patients saw me with the sign and would smile and give a thumbs up. Afterward, they told us they had no idea even what time of year it was. It reminded us of how painful it is not to be able to do simple things we often take for granted, like gather together as a community.”
“We didn’t know what we were getting into at the beginning. There were just so many unknowns. It made it very challenging. Now we have more experience with COVID-19, and we know how to take care of these patients and maintain them.”
RABBI JASON WEINER, PhD,
PETER CHEN, MD,
senior rabbi and director of the Cedars-Sinai Spiritual Care department
assistant director of the Women’s Guild Lung Institute, and director of the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, who has been treating COVID-19 patients in the ICU
| DISCOVERIESMAGAZINE.ORG
