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Staying Salus Strong
Feature
STAYING SALUS STRONG
A Lot of Planning and a Little Luck in the Long Battle Against COVID-19
When Salus University president Michael
Mittelman, OD ’80, MPH, MBA, FAAO,
FACHE, traveled to China in December 2019, he started seeing articles about a new virus called COVID-19 that was concerning Chinese health officials.
As a healthcare professional, Dr. Mittelman kept tracking the spread of the virus when he returned home and continued to do so through the first few months of 2020. He suggested in his weekly messages to students, faculty, and staff, that it was just a matter of time before the virus would have to be more directly confronted in the United States.
And, it wasn’t long before it happened.
The University issued its initial COVID-19 guidelines on March 5, 2020, followed by travel and meeting restrictions for employees five days later; and announced didactic instruction would go online. Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf shut down the state on March 13 and sent all non-essential personnel to work from home, suggesting the virus could be under control within a few weeks.
“I didn’t think it was only going to last the two weeks that Gov. Wolf had suggested. I thought we’d go eight to 10 weeks, we’d get this thing in the bag and then we’d slowly be able to get back to normal,” said Dr. Mittelman.
But, in addition to the safety of the Salus family, an immediate concern was how would the University keep educating its students during the pandemic?
Quite effectively, it turned out, under
DR. MICHAEL MITTELMAN
the circumstances. In fact, it took the University just two days over the weekend to pivot to online learning.
“Kudos to the faculty and the students for doing that. I never doubted them, but never in my wildest dreams did I think it would be as seamless as it went,” said Dr. Mittelman.
One of the keys to the transition to online learning, according to Chris Esposito, director of the University’s Network and Security Services, was that while the University wasn’t necessarily prepared for a pandemic, it had for the past several years been working toward 24/7 support for its systems. This put the information technology crew in a good position to support the Salus community at home.
“We had to quickly pivot from onsite support to remote support, which comes with its share of challenges,” said Esposito. “And, then we had to balance user connectivity while keeping our eye on security and protecting the University’s network systems and data.”
Esposito believes the University’s recent data center updates provided the systems with a solid foundation.
Since the University had already made its learning cloud-based, the professors then needed to be equipped with Panopto — a recording software — in order to record their lectures from home, which the University actually started before the shutdown.
Decisions continued to be made as the pandemic raged on.
“We’ve made some tough decisions that were pretty much on target,” said Dr. Mittelman.
One of the most difficult decisions for administration, was to announce spring commencement would be virtual.
“I knew when I made the decision to take the spring graduation and make that virtual it would be controversial,” said Dr. Mittelman. “But I also knew — or at least believed based on the data we had at the time — that there was no way we were going to be able to safely congregate large groups of people in May.”
Getting small groups back on campus and into the clinical facilities safely in the fall became the primary responsibility of the security and facilities departments.
Richard Echevarria, Physical Plant director, and his staff, had a jump start on the pandemic. Screening tents, PPE and plexiglass dividers were ordered while a safety strategy was designed and screening protocols were put in place.
“My focus really was to contain the entry points. I didn’t want multiple entry points into the school because then people bypass the screening,” said Carlos Rodriguez, director of Safety and Security.
To date, the situation continues to remain fluid, as the U.S. continues to struggle with containing the virus. Once students and faculty returned on a limited basis, the facilities department modified its cleaning schedule and staffing — increasing sanitization of high touchpoints, restrooms, equipment and labs between use.
New Student Orientation in August was a combination of virtual and smallgroup meetings. Fall commencement was once again virtual rather than in-person.
Through it all, the administration has remained proactive rather than reactive.
“We’ve been looking at different scenarios,” said Dr. Mittelman.
And, that’s not all. The planning includes a look beyond the pandemic.
“These are the discussions we’re having now: How do we make ourselves more broadly appealable? How do we make ourselves more attractive? But most importantly, how do we make ourselves more resilient to things that will affect us externally and that we can’t control?” said Dr. Mittelman. “The post-pandemic planning is just as important as the pre-pandemic planning. You have to be ready for the next one because it will happen again.”
