Hospitals inundated with coronavirus patients pulled in cardiologists, anesthesiologists, and other workers to help in ICUs
- The novel coronavirus forced an all-hands-on-deck situation at many hospitals in the US, especially in areas hit hardest by the virus.
- As elective procedures shut down, many healthcare workers volunteered or were sent to help on the frontlines of fighting the pandemic.
- Hospitals like Massachusetts General Hospital and Cooper Health established teams of doctors from different specialties, such as cardiologists, anesthesiologists, and others, to help with the surge in intensive-care units.
- During the pandemic, methods like proning, or the process of flipping patients on their stomachs to help them breathe, have become more commonplace and doctors have started to more regularly see issues like blood clots become in patients.
- In these cases, healthcare workers with expertise in areas like cardiology and physical therapy — who don't typically work in ICUs — have become instrumental in helping care for patients.
Dr. Devinder Singh, a cardiology fellow at Cooper Health in Camden, New Jersey, doesn't typically work in the intensive care unit.
But during most of May, that's the place you would have found him: caring for coronavirus patients suffering from breathing difficulties, blood clots, and other complications.
A few weeks ago, he, along with seven other fellows from his department, volunteered to help on the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic. Other healthcare workers from EMTs to nurse anesthetists to physical therapists offered up their services as well, as hospitals became inundated with coronavirus patients.
Hospitals like Cooper Health and Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital established teams of healthcare workers from different specialties to make sure there were enough hands on deck to handle the surge of patients during the height of the pandemic.
Now that patient numbers are tapering down, healthcare workers like Singh are slowly returning to their regular schedules. But up until recently, it was all hands on deck for many hospitals in areas hit hardest by the virus.
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The teams were first created as a necessity, but as methods like proning, or the process of flipping patients on their stomachs to help them breathe, became more commonplace and doctors began to more regularly see complex issues like blood clots in patients, the collective expertise that multiple disciplines brought to ICUs became instrumental in helping care for patients.
Teams of doctors help bring different kinds of expertise in treating coronavirus patients
Cardiologists like Singh, for example, were readily able to explain and treat blood clots in patients, an increasingly common complication of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.
Physical therapists were instrumental in helping prone patients, flipping them so they're flat on their stomachs, which helps them breathe. Operating room assistants and anesthetists translated their knowledge in operating rooms to COVID-19 patients who needed intensive care and ventilation.
Singh's team members included surgical, anesthesia, and medicine residents.
The first day on the job at the ICU, a few weeks ago, was "initially very overwhelming," Singh told Business Insider. But as the day went along, and with help from doctors who had already been treating patients with the disease, Singh said he and his team were able to help figure out how they could best take care of the patients in their unit.
"I don't think there are any COVID experts in the world yet," Singh said, but the different expertise that he and his colleagues brought in helped to cover different complications that each patient was dealing with.
Singh's training in cardiovascular complications, for example, helped his team understand how to care for patients with blood clots. Though he added, "there's a lot to be understood about the clotting problem that comes with COVID."
Singh says that the numbers of COVID-19 patients are now coming down to the point where extra fellows and residents are able to return to their regular rotations. He'll be back to his regular schedule on June 8th.
But there was a reason why they were brought on during the height of the pandemic.
"These COVID patients are the sickest of the sick," said Dr. Stephen Trzeciak, chief of medicine at Cooper University Health Care.
That, and the sheer volume of the patients that were coming into the facilities, prompted the hospital to establish these volunteer teams, which included everyone from medical students to neurologists and anesthesiologists.
Multidisciplinary 'proning teams' are helping COVID-19 patients
The hospital also set up "proning teams" to more regularly flip patients onto their stomachs to better help them breathe.
Proning has been around for a while, but its popularity surged amid the coronavirus pandemic, which had sent a huge influx of patients with breathing problems into hospitals. When patients with breathing problems are flipped onto their stomachs, it helps open up the airways in their lungs and makes it easier for oxygen to travel in.
The act of proning a patient, according to Trzeciak, is much harder to do than it might seem because the patients tend to be so sick.
"It's a challenging job because of the meticulous care and caution that needs to be done when you're turning these patients who are among the most fragile," said Trzeciak. "They're just barely clinging to life and you have to be very careful as you do that."
Colleen Snydeman, director of the nursing and patient care services office of quality and safety at Massachusetts General Hospital, also developed multidisciplinary teams to help address the influx of patients when the hospital was inundated with COVID-19 cases.
Snydeman says that the proning teams at Massachusetts General Hospital are made up of nurses, OR assistants, respiratory therapists, and physical therapists, all of whom play an instrumental role.
"I think we were really fortunate to leverage the knowledge, expertise, and experience of these different disciplines," Snydeman told Business Insider. "It's what really made this team unique."
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