CALLED TO SERVE Nursing students volunteer at call center during pandemic STORY BY JOANNA ARMSTRONG ’17 PHOTOS BY ROBIN JOHNSON ’99 & ’19
D
URING THE SPRING at the Nacogdoches County coronavirus call center and testing site, faculty members and students from SFA’s DeWitt School of Nursing spent their time answering calls and providing relief to overworked medical professionals and members of the community by screening patients for the coronavirus and addressing their concerns. Established as a collaboration among the School of Nursing, Nacogdoches Medical Center Health Network, Nacogdoches Memorial Health, Excel ER, East Texas Community Health Services, and local physicians and government officials, the call center and testing site opened March 25. It operated for about two months with volunteers logging more than 2,700 calls and health care providers completing 586 tests. “Our goal was to create a unified entity, a single voice to say we care about our community, and we are going to get through this together,” said Matthew Malloy ’06,
Nacogdoches Memorial Professional Group manager of quality and co-administrator for the testing site. Working four-hour shifts, Cheyenne Kelley, an SFA nursing student who has since graduated, answered 20 to 30 calls a day, some lasting only 10 minutes with others taking as long as 45 minutes. Kelley and the other senior nursing students who volunteered at the call center used the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines to ask patients a series of questions. Starting with basic information like name and date of birth, they would then progress to more specific questions relating to signs and symptoms, travel history and exposure to illness. If a patient was identified as high risk, the call was transferred to one of the physicians or nurse practitioners on hand to determine if testing was needed. “As transitioning nursing students, this was a good way to do what we could with the expertise we have,” Kelley said.
SAWDUST / FALL 2020
25
