Alumni
Welcome
No comments have been posted

Alumna Fighting COVID-19 in Union Hospital Emergency Department

Nurse practioner Ann Marie Gamble '03, right, pictured with Megan Mills Jones '03, has been fighting COVID-19 in the Emergency Department at Union Hospital in Elkton, Maryland. 

What does your job currently entail, and how has your job shifted in the past month?
Actually, things have slowed down for us because people are appropriately staying away from the ERs. To see a patient, you now put on an N95 mask, you put a surgical mask on over that, we have goggles on, we have a face shield and then gloves. Usually we would go into a room without anything but a pair of gloves on. Like many people, we’re reusing a lot of the PPE like our N95s and our surgical masks.

Since this has all started, people have been bringing us lunch every day. Local restaurants have been bringing us lunch, police departments have been bringing us lunch. The other day the local emergency services had a parade around the hospital thanking us, so there’s been a lot of really nice things that have happened and people showing their thanks to us, so that’s really been nice.

There’s a lot of camaraderie between all of us working at the hospital. It’s funny, we’re so distant from everybody else. Like if you go to the grocery store, you’re staying away from each other, but at work things haven’t really changed because we’re all so close to each other working together, which is the nature of the job, but when you leave there, you’re more aware of the distance that you have to keep between people. It’s definitely not as isolating as life outside of the hospital.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, what was a day typically like at work?
Usually it’s pretty busyyou’re just trying to get from one patient to the next. Usually the waiting room is packed and we might have people in the hallways, but now because people are staying away from the ER, some of which is good and some of which is bad, it’s different. We don’t really have a waiting room full of people. We do have a big tent outside, so the people who are coming in well enough but with COVID-like symptomsfever, dry cough, muscle achesthey’re being filtered through a tent outside, so they’re not even going into the hospital. Inside the hospital, things have slowed down. There’s no elective surgeries, and people aren’t coming to the hospital for regular appointments, so the rest of the hospital is pretty slow.

Was that expected?
We were kind of expecting things to slow down initially. They’re starting to pick up now. All the cities got hit pretty hard, and we are definitely a more suburban/rural area, so I think we’re going to see it later. It has slowed down. They’ve cut some of our shifts and they’ve cut some hours because the volume is not there. Some of that is probably because people come in for small complaints like sore throats, stuff like that, but then you worry about the people who are really sick and they’re afraid to come to the ER.
 
Back