Page 17 - HealthcareNews May/June 2021

SALUTE TO NURSES CONT’D
THANK
YU
Christine Klucznik equated the first several weeks of COVID to “building a plane while it was flying in the air.”
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lot of listening and learning. For this issue and its salute to nurses, we examine how area nursing staffs did all
of that — and combined compassion with resiliency and creativity to stare down a challenge that was truly unprecedented.
Changing on the Fly
NURSES
Flashing back more than 15 months to the beginning of March 2020, Klucznik recalled the day COVID arrived at Baystate.
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There had been a num- ber of discussions prior to that first case about how
to prepare, and general thoughts that the medical center was ready, she told HCN, adding quickly that there was simply no way to be totally prepared for what was about to happen.
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world-class healthcare for
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our nation’s heroes.
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Join the VA today and provide world- class healthcare for our nation's heroes.
“Within a day ... it just exploded — it was really like nothing we had ever seen,” she recalled. “And the hardest thing for the entire medical community was that no one knew what they were doing. We heard about what was happening on the West Coast, watching it evolve and spread so quickly. But when it hit, we went from two patients to 100 patients in the span of a couple of weeks.
“It was like building a plane while it was flying in the air — it was quite incred- ible,” she went on, adding that, as units of the hospital were converted from their traditional uses to COVID care, nurses found themselves working in different areas of the hospital and with people they didn’t know, and caring for a population they knew nothing about.
“When you think about all that change, and the nurse’s ability to say, ‘today I’m doing cardiac nursing, and the next day I’m taking care of COVID patients,’ it says a lot about their resiliency,” Klucznik said. “And then you think about the moral distress — they’re trying to make sure that they stay alive and that their families don’t get sick, because we didn’t know what the exposure was.”
“We had so many people write to us about how this nurse or that nurse was there for them. They knew that their loved one was not going to pass alone; someone was going to be there with them.”
Others we spoke with told similar stories about nurses transitioning to new roles and accepting new responsibilities (leaving research or education and moving to the ICU, for example), working with people they’d never worked with before, going to great lengths to assist the families of patients in the hospital, and much more — all in a stress-filled, tension-packed environment where change was constant and uncertainty ruled the day.
In that setting, Desai kept thinking about what her nursing instructor said to her all those years before about creativity and overcoming challenge, and how you need the former to accomplish the latter.
She has many examples, and started with the glass doors to the HMC intensive- care unit and how the nurses made full use of them to preserve precious PPE.
class healthcare for our nation's heroes.
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“To keep from going in and out of rooms, they learned
MAY/JUNE 2021
Keyword “Veterans Adminstration” Search Location: “Leeds, MA”
“Honoring America’s Veterans by providing exceptional care that improves their health and well-being.”
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