Healthcare Heroes Stretched Thin by Pandemic Fueled Heavy Lifting

As COVID-19 cases skyrocket in Oshkosh, pressure and stress for workers on the front lines have surged concurrently. Health care professionals have been pushed to new limits, working diligently to adapt and keep pace. Hannah Anklam, a registered nurse at Mercy Medical Center in Oshkosh, has experienced great change in her workplace due to increasing numbers.

“We have so many amazing and hard working people in the hospitals, but everybody is just exhausted,” she said. “Every single career is affected by it, but you just see all these health care workers absolutely exhausted with trying to encourage their patients while managing really stressful work conditions.”

Contributing to the growing collective exhaustion are the extra hours workers have had to endure. Certified nursing assistant Donovan Eilbes works at Evergreen, an assisted living community. He has found that the amount of tasks that he is responsible for has grown dramatically.

“The workload has been increased, it feels like three times over,” he said. “The CDC is having us keep track of a lot of extra things, like they make sure that we have the residents all separated, and they want to be monitoring vital signs three times a shift. The most difficult part is trying to direct the residents to stay six feet apart. Which, just after seven months, has been a lot more difficult.” 

Alyson Larson, a family medicine doctor who works in an outpatient clinic at Aurora Medical Center, has seen her job change in many ways to prepare for any possible outcomes.

“When the pandemic first started and you guys were sent home from school and everything was shutting down, we, as a medical community, stopped doing anything that was elective or preventative,” she said. “We started to prepare for what we would do if we had a surge like what was happening in New York City at that time.”

People all around the world have had to change their day-to-day life in order to keep others healthy, but health care professionals like Anklam are having to adjust to even more changes in order to ensure that the hospital environment is being kept clean and safe.

“A big part of my job that has changed is that policy has shifted dramatically,” she said. “There were so many questions. How do we admit patients with COVID to the hospital? How do we prepare a room? What sort of supplies are needed in the room to filter the air? Lots of different questions like that were not getting an answer. Those questions could really impact the safety of the patient or the people around them.”

To keep residents and nurses safe during this time, healthcare workers, like Eilbes, at nursing homes and assisted living communities frequently have to take extra precautions during this time. 

“The residents all have to eat in their rooms,” he said. “If a resident does leave or go to be out with family, they come back and they are put on a fourteen-day quarantine. We have to do the full gown, mask, gloves, basically all the PPE(Personal Protective Equipment), and they are not allowed to leave their rooms.”

As people have been working from home, virtual and live meetings have become a significant norm. For many, the healthcare industry has also switched to a new virtual format. Larson has been doing virtual visits, and the virtual aspect has presented some unexpected challenges.

“We’re still doing a lot of virtual visits which are interesting and different, and really changes how you think about, ‘how do I take care of this person,’ because being a doctor you really have to think about that examination,” she said. “That actual listening to their lungs, listening to their heart, looking in ears, looking in their throat, and not being able to do that, how can I decide if this is enough? Is this not enough? Do you still have to go in? Do we need to see you do a test?”

With a pandemic as easily transmitted as COVID, new protocols are inevitable. However, since nursing homes call for close contact between nurses and patients, Olivia Knitt, an activity specialist at Parkview Health Center, isn’t always able to stay six feet away from residents. 

“We’re told to avoid being super close if we don’t have to be, but a lot of the time that’s not an option,” she said. “Some residents are either hard of hearing or they aren’t safe to be walking around on their own, so we need to be close to them. For the most part, staff mainly just need to wear a mask and eyewear when they’re interacting with residents.”

When it comes to school during the pandemic, a lot has changed for the nurses when a student doesn’t feel well. Stefanie Rebholz, a registered nurse who works at West and Tipler/ALPS, has had to adjust to a completely new protocol.

“We have a whole list of questions we have to go through each time someone becomes symptomatic and then have to call parents and have that discussion as well as figure out if students may have been exposed to a positive case,” she said. “It’s a lot different than just sending somebody home sick like we used to do.”

While a lot of people may be struggling with the emotional and social aspects of their lives, it has been especially hard for many healthcare workers to see their patients struggling. Knitt has been focusing on social health with her patients, especially with the elderly who aren’t able to have visitors frequently. 

“I think a big change is that families aren't able to come in much at all,” she said “That’s also changed the need for one-on-one visits with them. Just a lot more focusing on social health and making sure they are engaged in something throughout the week.”

For Eilbes, seeing residents trying to deal with isolation has been challenging.

“The hardest part is the emotional part to be quite honest,” he said. “I have heard about eight different residents say that they were lonely. Also, the residents who aren’t fully cognitively there are confused. They don’t understand why they can’t see their family.”

Everybody is going through challenges right now as they try to navigate these uncertain and difficult times. To combat this, staying organized and on track has become an integral part of Rebholz’s life.

“I think the time management piece has been bigger this year than in other years simply because this is a huge part of our day now, tracing and figuring out who has symptoms, and is it just a symptom of a cold or is it a symptom of coronavirus,” she said.

Just from looking at the statistics alone, Rebholz can see that Oshkosh and the surrounding area has a concerning amount of cases.

“From the numbers, it doesn’t look like Oshkosh is doing very well,” she said. “It’s really hard to know. We have a lot more access to testing so our numbers are quite a bit higher. It’s hard to say if that's because we’re just doing so much testing or if it’s really that much worse. If you look strictly at the numbers, it looks like we have some more work to do.” 

Although Anklam sympathizes with people who are fatigued from following COVID precautions, it’s difficult for her to see people completely disregard them.

“I would say Winnebago county is struggling in that people are burned out from all these policy changes, and then they’re not willing to stick with it,” she said. “I can kind of understand where they’re coming from in the sense that everybody is so tired, but it is sometimes a little frustrating to see that there are easier things we could be doing to slow it down a little bit, and people just aren’t sticking to it.”

Knitt encourages people to be smart about their choices during this time in order to keep everyone safe. 

“I would just say use common sense,” she said. “If you have to go out, do what you need to do but just do the basic stuff that we’re told to do when there’s anything going around like if it’s flu season. Wash your hands, wipe stuff down in your house. Keep yourself healthy.”

Rebholz wears a mask to protect the people close to her whose health might be hindered, and encourages others to do the same.

“People need to think about how their decision is affecting someone else because when I wear my mask that’s what I think about,” she said. “I’m really trying to protect my parents and people with underlying health conditions. I’m not as worried about myself as I am about other people.”

Although wearing a mask and maintaining a six foot minimum distance away from other people can be bothersome, as Anklam points out, following protocol saves lives.

“It might be frustrating, it might be inconvenient, but ultimately frustration and inconvenience matter less than somebody's life,” she said. “We’re not saying you have to enjoy it, but we just ask that people wear their mask and be safe around who they're going to see, simply for the sake of potentially protecting somebody else's life.”

By: Meghan Oakes

Oshkosh West Index Volume 117 Issue 3

December 11th, 2020