10 minute read
Faces on the front
PHOTO BY JOSHUA CLARK
Faces
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Norah Kilpatrick, right, readies a test for fellow student Jennifer Neely to give to a resident at Hotel 166, which the City of Chicago is using to shelter high-risk individuals during the pandemic.
on the Front
As the country shut down in an eff ort to ward off the spread of COVID-19 in the spring of 2020, UIC College of Nursing faculty, students and alumni were doing just the opposite.
Businesses shuttered their doors. Schools went virtual. People left their homes only for the essentials, hunkering down like a never-ending storm was approaching.
But not UIC nurses. Far from only doing the essential, many went running to the frontlines. They knew that hospital ICUs would soon be inundated; that testing sites would need staffi ng; that triage lines would need to be answered by experts. They also knew this wasn’t a benign call-to-duty. This was a merciless and invisible enemy, a virus that was killing thousands of people each week, which could infect them and their families.
But as so many of our community told us, the call to use the skills they learned at UIC Nursing and through hard-earned experience was just too strong. They wanted to help.
Norah Kilpatrick, a pre-licensure master’s degree student, says that, at the beginning of the pandemic, “I felt pretty useless.” She began volunteering, and later working, with an interdisciplinary team to test people across Chicago in homeless shelters, encampments, senior housing and long-term care facilities.
“I can’t tell you how much this means to me, to be part of a team that responds to outbreaks and is actually making a diff erence during a pandemic,” she says.
READ MORE Faces on the Front and extended profi les at nursing.uic.edu/news-stories/faces-on-the-front.
In March, the UI Health Pilsen Family Health Center Lower West was a comprehensive family clinic. By April, it had transformed into a temporary COVID-19 assessment site, staffed by an interprofessional team of providers, including UIC Nursing clinical faculty members Carolyn Dickens, PhD ’17, APRN, ACNP-BC, Janey Kottler, DNP, FNP-BC, and Karen Cotler,DNP, FNP-BC, FAANP.
The providers evaluate patients to see Carolyn Dickens, right, gets fitted with if they should be tested for COVID, protective gear before the Pilsen clinic if they can manage at home or need opens to assess COVID patients. to be hospitalized, and if they have comorbidities that could put them at higher risk, says Kottler, a clinical instructor who typically practices at the college's Mile Square Health Center.
Dickens, UI Health nurse practitioner in cardiology and adjunct clinical assistant professor at UIC Nursing, says she is proud of how her fellow advanced practice nurses (APRNs) stepped up to volunteer at the new clinic.
“We recognize that this virus is highly contagious,” she says. “We’re all going to extra lengths to protect our families at home. But we all feel a responsibility as APRNs to provide the needed care for our patient population.”
It’s pretty crazy. These are complete white-outs. You don’t typically see that happen so fast.
ICU nurse Tom McClure, BSN ’18, talking about how a COVID-19 patient’s lungs look on an X-ray
the importance and eff ectiveness of palliative care is really being highlighted, and the same thing with hospice. We’re learning that, the more we talk to each other about our wishes for end-of-life,
the better off we are.”
Clinical associate professor Geraldine Gorman, PhD, RN, who practices as a home health hospice nurse on the weekends, pictured in the early days of the pandemic
After working 13 hours at the University of Illinois Hospital, UIC Nursing clinical assistant professor Julie Schwind, DNP ’17, MS ’06, BSN ’00, RN, clocked out, got to her car, and started sobbing.
She was exhausted and emotionally overwhelmed Julie Schwind by the critically ill patients who filled the floors of the hospital. The ICUs brimmed with COVID-19 patients and the stepdown units held patients who survived the disease but were then fighting liver and kidney failure. Some were unable to absorb tube feedings; some had bloody stools infiltrating their bedsores; some had been bedridden so long their muscles were wasting away.
“My coworkers are dying, and we all fear that we could be next,” she wrote in a Facebook post, referring to two UI Health nurses and a surgical technician who died of COVID-19. “My patients are dying, and their families cannot be there. My fellow nurses are struggling, because there has never been anything like this in our careers, and it is hard to fathom keeping up this level of work indefinitely.”
With a full-time faculty position, Schwind no longer typically practices as a floor nurse, but she offered to take on shifts at University of Illinois Hospital to help combat the pandemic. After an accelerated orientation—led in part by one of her former students—she was assigned to the neuro stepdown unit, where she was working 12-hour shifts each week in addition to her teaching duties.
But she ended her post, which she wrote during National Nurses Work, on a note of optimism.
“Nurses, you are amazing,” she wrote. “I have NEVER been more proud to be a nurse.”
PHOTO BY JOSHUA CLARK
A typical day for the COVID Rapid Response Team is “organized chaos,” says UIC Nursing clinical assistant professor Rebecca Singer, DNP ’18, RN.
Four to fi ve days each week, a team composed of health sciences faculty and students from UIC and Rush University arrives at a site somewhere in Chicago to conduct COVID-19 testing under a contract with the Chicago Department of Public Health. The sites include homeless shelters, encampments, senior housing and long-term care facilities.
“We come with our personal protective equipment—gloves, gowns, masks, face shields—all our testing equipment, plus all the cleaning supplies we need to clean before and after testing,” says Singer, who co-leads the project with UIC College of Medicine assistant professor Stockton Mayer.
(L-R) UIC Nursing's Rebecca Singer, Thomas Huggett, a physician with Lawndale Christian Health Center, and Stockton Mayer, UI Health Infectious Disease specialist, consult at Hotel 166, a testing site in Chicago.
Because the people being tested are particularly at-risk, the project aligns well with the college’s mission of social justice and care for vulnerable populations.
Singer, who has worked with Doctors Without Borders for more than a decade, says she was “eager to do something to help the humanitarian crisis in my own country.” Earlier in the pandemic, she managed a pop-up COVID-19 testing site for employees of the University of Illinois Hospital and Health Sciences System. She says working with future health leaders is one of the highlights of the project.
“It’s thrilling to see these students—young future doctors, nurses, dentists, pharmacists—stepping up and saying, ‘I want to help solve this problem and be part of this solution,’” Singer says.
Singer was featured in a University of Illinois and Illinois Public Media-produced podcast, Rising to the Challenge, and a UIC Creative & Digital Services video on lens.uic.edu. Both contributed to this report.
As a pulmonary specialist at UI Health, Susan Corbridge has patients who are some of the most vulnerable for having poor outcomes if they contract COVID-19.
“It’s been super important to keep our patients with lung disease out of the hospital,” says Corbridge, PhD ’09, APRN, FAANP, FAAN, who is executive associate dean at the UIC College of Nursing and maintains her clinical practice in addition to her role at the college.
Corbridge says many of her patients are “extremely scared” to leave their houses, so telehealth has been a vital way to continue to care for them. Still, it’s been an adjustment for both providers and patients, as they navigate a new way of delivering healthcare.
“This has been a true learning curve for all of us,” she said.
Given the almost-overnight transition to telehealth in her practice, Corbridge says she and her team began to wonder what affect the change might have on access to care. Telehealth requires having access to technology—a video-capable device and relatively high-speed Internet access—and the know-how to use it.
She is working with Mary Pasquinelli, DNP ’18, MS ’14, a nurse practitioner who specializes in lung cancer, to conduct a study of 200 patients in their practice to look at whether telehealth is creating disparities—whether due to race, age, income or other factors—and how to break down those barriers.
“I think it’s going to be really eye-opening, and something we’ll be able to share with the entire UI Health system,” Corbridge says.
To me, one of the hardest things to deal with in this pandemic is that we might be the only people that a patient is going to see before they expire. We just go in there and make them as comfortable as possible and try to bring comfort and closure to families.
Jenine Johnson, a master's degree student who works as a patient care tech at Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center
Beth Todd
It had been four hours since the patient arrived in the ambulance bay, and Beth Todd, RN, PEL-CSN, hadn’t left her side.
Todd was crammed in a small, hot room with seven people, all wearing protective gowns, gloves and masks. The 50-year-old patient, a woman, was struggling to breathe, her skin was marbled and red. The team tried to intubate her, but her throat was so dry it took two tries.
It was March 2020, just as the COVID-19 epidemic was hitting the U.S. in full force. Todd, a DNP student at the UIC Nursing campus in Rockford, was working as a third-shift ER nurse. She was living in a pop-up camper in her driveway so she wouldn’t infect her family as she returned from work each day.
In that small room, Todd and another nurse worked feverishly to stabilize the patient, pouring in fl uids, maintaining sedation, starting antibiotics, ordering labs, pushing pain medications and ordering restraints to keep her arms away from the tubes. The patient had eight IV lines.
When Todd handed off the patient to the ICU team after fi ve hours without a break, she disrobed from her COVID gear and immediately returned to the ER to tend to two, less urgent patients.
There, she learned the patient’s husband—who wasn’t allowed inside the hospital due to COVID restrictions—had been calling for updates. About an hour later, she heard a call for a “Code Blue” to the patient’s room. Her husband never made it to the hospital to say goodbye. COVID was determined as the cause of death.
“My teammates and I were devastated,” Todd says. “I was emotionally, physically and mentally drained. I was overwhelmed, upset, sad and could not process what had just happened. And yet, I needed to continue the last two hours of my shift.”
Todd says similar stories happened later, but this one stays with her.
“She was one of those patients where you ask, ‘Could I have done something better or different to change the outcome? Did I miss something? Could she still be alive today?’”
Todd shared her story as part of a class project and it was adapted for this report.
They can’t see my face. They can only see my eyes. I can’t touch them. I have to try to reassure them verbally, making my eyes as kind as possible.
Elisabeth Schreiber, MS ’11, assistant director of advanced practice providers for UI Health’s Clinical Decision Unit, talking about providing compassionate care to patients while wearing PPE
