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Are You Aware? A Pandemic in the Country
This is part I in our “Rural America” Awareness Wednesday series. Read the other posts in the series here. When my family goes on road trips, we often measure our progress relative to population centers — sometimes pulling off the highway, briefly, to stop at a convenience store or a fast food joint along the way. Yet, sometimes, I find myself thinking about what life is like in the space between. My mother was born and raised in the mountains on the border of Washington and Idaho. We laugh at stories of her and her three sisters waking each other to venture out to the outhouse in the middle of the night,…
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Are You Aware? Front Lines
This is part IV in our “battlefronts” Awareness Wednesday series. Read the other posts in the series here. My favorite toy as a 4-year-old was a little black doctor’s bag. It included an orange reflex hammer and a yellow-and-blue shot and stethoscope. I took a first-aid course my freshman year in high school and was chosen as one of six first responders for the junior high. Our advisor would call us out of class, then we’d triage the situation and get started on taking care of our patient. We’d fill our advisor in once he was able to get his class situated and come join us. We also served as the…
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Healthcare Education :: PPE and Ventilators
As we’ve seen over the past weeks, we are all interconnected in the fight to slow the spread of COVID-19 and save lives. Social distancing was our first crucial step. As we continue to maintain social distancing protocols, if we do it right, we can “flatten the curve” of infection. This buys us precious time to ramp up our efforts on the second vital step: increasing the capacity of our hospital systems. As exponentially more people get sick, emergency rooms and hospitals will need far greater numbers of personnel and equipment. Frontline responders in hospitals across the country are already reporting shortages of essential equipment. This is taking place on a systems level,…
