Making the Rounds: Assuaging Fears: Medical Students Helping Calm a Nervous Public During Pandemic

Making the Rounds

April 7, 2020 Issue 237

Breaking News

After receiving an additional 250 test kits late Monday, UNLV Medicine's COVID-19 curbside testing is scheduled to continue through Thursday, April 9th. We are actively seeking more tests and intenc to continue testing as many Southern Nevadans as possible. So far, UNLV Medicine personnel have administered more than 2,300 tests.

Friends and Colleagues,

As COVID-19 hits Southern Nevada, members of the UNLV School of Medicine/UNLV Medicine healthcare team work on the frontlines to mitigate its effects. They provide curbside testing for the novel coronavirus, treat patients 24-7 in ICUs at hospitals across the Las Vegas Valley, and answer thousands of phone calls in our contact center each day from frightened Las Vegans. In today’s newsletter, we focus on the contact center, where so many of our students not only make curbside testing appointments for individuals who meet CDC guidelines, but they also provide the kind of caring, evidence-based information that thankful callers say has helped them deal with the anxiety spawned by a viral pandemic. The UNLV School of Medicine team is working to help Las Vegas deal with the current crisis. I salute you.

Coronavirus Crisis

Here's How You Can Help

The UNLV Foundation has set up a site for those wanting to support the relief efforts, including an emergency fund for School of Medicine students (Nancy Atkinson Perkins Memorial Fund) and a UNLV Medicine Fund for Patient Care to help cover medical expenses for patients who are uninsured or underinsured.

Give Today

(Go to the page and click on “View all giving opportunities”)

Thanks to generous donors, care packages containing comfort foods, snacks and healthy drinks are being delivered to UNLV School of Medicine resident physicians who are working long hours at several area hospitals.

Medical Students Helping Calm a Nervous Public During Pandemic

Third year medical students Maran Shaker and Lennon Zimmerman are among those volunteering to screen callers at UNLV Medicine's COVID-19 curbside testing contact center. (Tuesday, March 24th, 2020)

The UNLV School of Medicine students, spread out in rooms to abide by CDC social distancing guidelines, take phone calls from people, many of them fearful and crying -- all of them are hoping for the opportunity to receive appointments for COVID-19 curbside testing.

The calls come in one after another to the UNLV Medicine offices in the Westbay Office Park on West Charleston Boulevard -- more than 2,000 a day for the last two-and-a-half weeks. Many callers wonder if they, or their loved ones, will die from the novel coronavirus. So many calls came in when the program began in March, the number of students and residents answering calls was expanded from five to 18.

“The first week was especially tough with an enormous volume of callers,” says third year medical student Maran Shaker after a long day of taking calls about the UNLV Medicine curbside testing program just up the road at 1125 S. Shadow Lane. “Some hadn’t even spoken to anyone in days and just wanted to connect with another person. Other callers were too afraid to buy groceries and reported that they were only eating what they could find at home.

“One elderly gentleman was afraid to go through the testing process in person. When I asked him why, he said, ‘If I test positive, will they take me away or lock me up?’ He believed that if someone tests positive for coronavirus, authorities would take them away to a location where they would be quarantined. That really showed me that to some community members, this pandemic is extremely scary and that we must do everything in our power to distribute accurate medical information and services to the Las Vegas community.”

Giving callers accurate information and letting them know what the primary literature actually says about the virus often calmed callers, notes Dr. Mitchell Lyons, a plastic surgery resident who also took calls.

“I think a lot of people need reassurance,” Lyons says. “There’s a lot of misinformation out there and I think as long we tell them what the evidence actually is, we can decrease hysteria.”

After calming callers, the medical students and physicians, under the direction of UNLV Medicine Business Operations Manager Micheal “Miko” Arausa and Supervisor Barb Chavez, have their own questions to ask:

Do you have a sore throat or cough? Have you felt that you have had a fever or measured a high temperature? Are you having trouble breathing or having shortness of breath? Did you have contact with a person who tested positive for COVID-19?

The questions -- there are several more --- are part of a federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention screening protocol to determine if someone meets the criteria for a test.

“She was crying uncontrollably to the degree that it was hard to understand her...One of her children had shown flu-like symptoms for a few days including some cough, sore throat and a fever...then the second...and the third as well. All of them sick and getting progressively worse.. She was home alone, without a support network...She continued to ask me, ‘Are my kids going to die?’" -- Maran Shaker

Dr. Mitchell Lyons

Hadley Johnson

Sarah Grimley

It’s been this way at the UNLV Medicine offices ever since UNLV Medicine President/CEO Dr. Michael Gardner and his team partnered with Clinical Pathology Labs (CPL) to provide what is now nearly 2500 tests. Gardner, well aware that other curbside testing programs tried around the country turned chaotic when hundreds of people showed up at the same time for testing, decided it would be best to do testing by appointment.

There has been no problem getting volunteers to take calls. Christie Putnam, the UNLV Medicine Procurement & Materials Management Director, who Gardner says has been invaluable in “making things happen for the curbside testing program,” says students work into the night returning calls. They include: Sarah Grimley, Ashley Prandecki, Maneesha Sakhuja, Horacio Guerra, Hadley Johnson, Damien Medrano, Erin Walsh, Shilpa Daulat, Monica Arebalos, William Fang, Kathie Velez, Kelsey Kincaid, Faun Botor, Greg Schreck, Michael Briones, Sabrina Novenschi, Marwa Maki, Cory Colombini, Lauren Hollifield, Ginger Christian, William Gravley, Doris Chan, Emily Guyaux, Lennon Zimmerman.

“I think I’m like most of the students,” says Hadley Johnson, who plans to become a psychiatrist. “I just wanted to contribute in some way to help people in this pandemic...I think this experience will undoubtedly influence the way I engage patients in the future...I’m trying to stay as upbeat, as positive as possible with the people I talk with, letting them know that the vast majority of people come out of this OK.”

Charter class student Sarah Grimley, who’s often worked the phones for 12 hours a day, says some of the calls for testing appointments came from people working in healthcare in Southern Nevada, including doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists and certified nursing assistants. She said she also heard from pilots and flight attendants, hotel and restaurant workers.

“I had quite a few patients who were crying,” Grimley says. “They were so anxious they were hyperventilating until I was able to help calm them down...Some things get blown out of proportion and people aren’t getting the accurate information they deserve. People often thank us for what we’re doing.”

Shaker, a combat medic in Afghanistan prior to entering medical school, says his experience talking to patients will better prepare him for his intended career in emergency medicine.

“A military concept that I embrace is that when things go wrong, we don’t rise to the occasion, but we fall back on our training,” Shaker says. “This pandemic will help better prepare a generation of healthcare providers and enhance our ability to respond to such large scale medical needs. This could very well be our training for something bigger in the future.”

Shaker says he will never forget a call from a mother concerned about her three children.

“She was crying uncontrollably to the degree that it was hard to understand her...One of her children had shown flu-like symptoms for a few days including some cough, sore throat and a fever...then the second...and the third as well. All of them sick and getting progressively worse. . She was home alone, without a support network...She continued to ask me, ‘Are my kids going to die?’...She had just lost her job and...implied to me that her world was crashing down.

“Yes, I found out all this information in a simple call screening for symptoms and risk factors for COVID-19. I realized that screening and testing weren’t enough for this call. A few kind words, some patient education and guidance on what to do in an emergency, and even some information about social services were all it took to give her a glimpse of hope by the end of the call. I also reassured her that there were medical resources available and that her children would be tested and could get medical attention if needed."