Managing anxiety, risk at a testing centre
Working 16 hour days, doctors and nurses test thousands of residents
NOTE TO READERS: As the community grapples with the COVID-19 pandemic, there are those who keep other people safe and keep essential services running, including doctors and nurses, grocery store clerks and garbage collectors. These are their stories from the front line of Niagara’s battle with the novel coronavirus.
Christina Huntington doesn’t see much of her two young children these days. For some 16 hours a day, the nurse practitioner is part of a squad of hospital workers testing local residents for the virus that has shut down the world.
Huntington leads the nurses and other staff at the St. Catharines’ hospital COVID-19 assessment centre. Working in both the clinic and the drivethru testing areas, she helps guide patients through the uncomfortable test that will determine if they need to spend at least two weeks cut off from the world recovering from the novel coronavirus.
By the time her day is done, there isn’t much energy left for anything else. But as a mother, she shares parenting duties with her husband — also an essential worker — and for homeschooling her kids who haven’t seen the inside of a classroom for weeks.
“I have two small children at home. So I’m working more than I was before. I’ll be honest. When I get home I’m kind of toast for them. Although as a mother, I try to keep up with some of these new challenges of education online and things like that,” Huntington says. “So it’s been a little emotional.”
The testing centre is a key part of the fight against COVID-19. In recent weeks, testing has been expanded with staff from public health, family doctors and medical clinics using the long nasal swabs to test residents. But the Niagara Health centre — and its sister centre in Niagara Falls — are where the bulk of the testing is done. As of Friday, some 4,520 people have been tested by Niagara Health with 244 of them resulting in confirmed infections of the potentially lethal virus.
With the headlines replete with stories about how dangerous COVID-19 can be — and the fact that there is not a cure or vaccine yet available — many people arrive at the assessment centre fearing the worst.
The test itself is also daunting, requiring the swab to be pushed deep into a person’s nasal cavity.
Patient anxiety is something Huntington says her team has to manage.
“I think the way that we have things here, especially for the part where people are coming into the assessment centre, we have someone that is escorting them in so they have the opportunity to sort of explain what’s going to happen to them,” she says. “Most everybody is anxious certainly, but I have to say that — which is completely heartwarming and it speaks to why I think we’re all doing this as well — is that people are just giving us such Thank Yous and accolades for being here and doing the work that we’re doing.”
The testing itself is done by doctors. But moving thousands of people through the assessment centre, especially with the end of the pandemic being unknown, requires more doctors than Niagara Health actually has on any given day.
So the hospital system called on Dr. Jennifer Frendo, a local family physician who works part-time at the hospital, to join the effort and recruit primary care doctors to work at the centre.
Dr. Karim Ali, director of the Niagara Health infectious disease department, “just called me one day once I was done in the operating room,” Frendo said. “He said, ‘We’re going to need help Jen. We’re going to need a lot of backup. We’re going to need help from our community doctors.’ And he said, ‘I can’t do everything. We need you if you could take this on.’ ”
Frendo, tasked with assembling community doctors to aid in the hospitals COVID-19 efforts, recruited a few dozen MDs who work in shifts testing new arrivals.
Managing the massive caseload over long days — like Huntington, Frendo works 16 hours a day between the centre and her own practise — is only part of task.
Each time they test a patient, a doctor and a nurse are potentially exposing themselves to the virus.
The risk is real.
As of Friday, at least six Niagara Health staff and one Niagara paramedic have contracted the virus. Overall, health-care workers — most of them staffing long-term-care homes with COVID-19 outbreaks — comprise more than 17 per cent of all of Niagara’s confirmed cases.
And while both Frendo and Huntington said they are being well supported by Niagara Health with proper equipment and training, constant vigilance is their best defence. A mistake made in putting on or taking off their protective equipment could expose them to the virus.
“Some things we do subconsciously. Part of what we’re doing here is we’re conscious of every step we do,” said Frendo. “Because if there’s a break in the routine of keeping yourself and your patients safe, then that’s when the risk is introduced. So every step that we do, we are constantly thinking of it each time.”