Pandemic takes toll on health care industry | News, Sports, Jobs

More than a dozen UPMC Altoona nurses participated in a COVID-19 candlelight vigil in Cricket Field Plaza across from the hospital on Nov. 18, 2020. Forty-three electric candles were illuminated for each COVID-19 death in Blair County at that time. Mirror file photo by Patrick Waksmunski

Editor’s Note: This is the sixth in a series looking back at COVID-19, highlighting the toll the pandemic took on those in the health care profession.

Kerri Golden’s husband Tim was an orthotist who worked in health care for 25 years.

Golden worked through the pandemic, fitting orthotics at nursing homes and hospitals — and witnessing the devastation in those facilities, an experience that left him burned out.

Last year, Golden took leave of the profession and now works as a facility manager at a local high school, plowing snow and overseeing projects, his wife said.

He loves it, she said.

Her husband’s experience exemplifies the toll the pandemic took on members of the health care professions, according to Kerri, who is dean of the School of Health Sciences and Education at Saint Francis University.

It wasn’t just the deaths, but also the tests her husband had to take on entering those facilities, the questions about his health he had to answer, the protective equipment he had to wear, then remove, and especially his worry about bringing the virus home to his family and his aging parents or spreading the disease to his patients.

It was a burden, she said.

But nurses in the hospitals had it worse.

The pandemic put them under severe stress, with the sheer volume of sick patients, medical uncertainty about how best to treat COVID, loss of life at a rate none of them had experienced before, extra hours of work away from their families, the need to quarantine when they were exposed to the virus — and the novelty of it all, according to Kerri Golden.

It led to exhaustion, anxiety and depression for many, aggravating the social isolation enforced by the COVID shutdowns, depriving those nurses and others of activities that helped make life enjoyable, while increasing the need for counseling and antidepressant medications to cope with it all, she said.

The toll on nurses and other health care providers led many to quit health care altogether, like her husband did, exacerbating a pre-existing nursing shortage, Golden said.

That, in turn, was further aggravated by the high number of nurses reaching retirement age at the time, Golden said.

The experience of living through COVID has also created training and education issues for those students now in college who will be restocking the health care professions in the immediate future.

Academically, they on average are half a grade behind pre-pandemic levels, Golden said, citing the Associated Press.

Instructors at Saint Francis are trying to help them adapt — to get caught up, she said.

In middle and high school, those students who are now in college felt lots of stress from sitting at home day-after-day, with many losing loved ones to the virus, and all of them missing milestone life events, she said.

Many experienced grief for such losses, she said.

Grief changes people, for better or worse, sometimes depending on the amount of support they receive from family and community, she said.

It also changes the way they look at the world, she said.

The effects linger, and the experience needs to be acknowledged, she said.

Those pre-college experiences have manifested themselves in the demand for health services at Saint Francis being at levels that are “exponentially” higher than before, Golden said.

That has resulted in the need for more counselors and expanded hours for help to be available, she said.

Many students are disinclined toward face-to-face interactions like those in faculty offices and prefer email communications — the likely result of their having spent COVID interacting via screen, she said.

To counter that disinclination for face-to-face interaction, instructors have been training students in the importance of making eye contact with patients, of listening actively and of reading non-verbal cues like facial expressions and tones of voice, she said.

The COVID experience also seems to have left current college students with compromised resilience, according to Golden.

Instructors have noticed that they’re easily overwhelmed, easily moved to tears, that they need more than the previously typical time to process feedback and that they need frequent reassurance that things will work out, as long as they continue to apply themselves, she said.

Instructors have learned that they need to be patient with such students, she said.

Those students “want to be heard,” she said. “Our job is to help them build resilience.”

That help can take the form of encouragement and support through failure, coupled with kindness and compassion, she said.

“The world needs more of that (anyway),” she said.

Being a small school, Saint Francis has the capacity to provide such help, she said.

“We want them to be successful,” she said. “To get them out in the real world to help other people.”

The COVID-era experiences of such students, coupled with their experiences in college, will help them become better practitioners after they graduate, because they’ll be inclined to provide patients with the kind of compassion and understanding they needed — and received — themselves, Golden predicted.

UPMC played its part

During the pandemic, UPMC helped provide guidance on dealing with COVID in the communities it serves and throughout the U.S., according to a statement provided to the Mirror by a spokesperson for the organization.

“There was a massive amount of information, research and resource sharing,” the spokesperson stated. “Our contributions were critical to rapidly developing the best practices for caring for patients with COVID-19 worldwide, preventing people with immunocompromising conditions from contracting the disease and continuing the provision of high-quality health care to all of our patients.”

To help ensure continuing medical care despite widespread discouragement of face-to-face interactions, UPMC “scaled up” its telemedicine, so more patients could encounter doctors electronically from home and so doctors could encounter patients electronically in rural hospitals, according to the spokesperson.

UPMC also created a Post-COVID Recovery Clinic to help develop a better understanding of long COVID — diagnosing and treating about 1,200 people with “persistent symptoms,” according to the statement.

The organization has also worked to alleviate the nursing shortage that pre-dated COVID and was aggravated by the pandemic.

During the pandemic, the organization launched initiatives to interest middle school, high school and post-secondary students in nursing through job shadowing, career fairs and paid internships, according to the spokesperson.

Since the pandemic, UPMC has striven to educate and recruit “the next generation of healthcare professionals,” with hospitals in the organization cooperating with local school districts on “immersive career days” and shadowing opportunities, the spokesperson stated.

The organization has also developed partnerships with colleges, universities and clinical training programs that are designed to make it easy for individuals in those settings to move into jobs at UPMC hospitals, according to the spokesperson.

Mental health challenges

For the vast majority of the members of the Blair County chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, the stress and fear associated with COVID has disappeared, according to Aimee Burns, the organization’s executive director.

For perhaps 10% of the members, however, some COVID concerns linger, Burns said.

Those concerns manifested themselves in the recent winter, when some members stopped attending group meetings, saying they planned to wait for spring, when illnesses going around at the time should have retreated, Burns said.

When COVID began raging five years ago, many local NAMI members grew afraid to come out of their homes, she said, as they were “anxiety stricken” for fear of contracting the disease.

The enforced isolation of the shutdowns aggravated such anxiety, she said.

Further aggravating such problems for NAMI members were difficulties they had accessing mental health services, she said.

There was a pre-existing shortage of mental health providers, which got worse, she said. During COVID, waiting lists for service meant delays of three to six months.

Additional problems were caused by requirements that sessions be conducted electronically to avoid physical contact. According to Burns, it took some agencies a while to work out telehealth policies that ensured there wouldn’t be privacy violations.

Conversely, some patients lacked the electronic equipment for telehealth connections, she said.

The therapy service delays have eased somewhat, Burns said, noting telehealth sessions aren’t ideal, anyway.

“Nothing can replace the one-on-one in-the-same-room type of therapy,” she said.

It’s likely that some mental health patients have residual scarring and trauma from the COVID experience, according to Burns.

“But I can’t say for sure,” she said.

Nationally, there has been “chatter” that a survey may be forthcoming to document the issue, she said, adding that such a survey ought to be done.

Mirror Staff Writer William Kibler is at 814-949-7038.