‘There’s always life’ on the roof at Allegheny General Hospital.
Fresh off a morning seeing patients in clinic, resident Deanna Huffman started her afternoon shift at Allegheny General Hospital with a list of tasks: sweep around the garden beds, prune the tomatoes, harvest the snap peas.
Up on the roof of the hospital’s Hemlock Street Parking Garage, doctors and residents have planted eight raised garden beds as part of an initiative designed to relieve stress for residents and provide food to patients in need.
“It’s pretty well known that there’s a burnout crisis in medicine, and we’re a residency program, training future doctors,” said Dr. Anastasios Kapetanos, director of the residency program. “It was an opportunity to get our residents outside the building, get some sunlight and some wellness benefits of gardening, and we could tangibly give something back.”
Dr. Kapetanos first proposed the idea in an email in February 2018. From there, it was a two-year journey to find the right spot on the hospital’s North Side campus. A courtyard that was identified — and even leveled during the wintertime — ended up being too shady during the summer. A rooftop that looked promising turned out to need tens of thousands of dollars in reinforcement to work as a garden.
“The chief operating officer would go on like, three-, four-hour walks with us, just on campus,” said Dr. Kapetanos, describing the search for a plot. “Finally he said, why don’t we go check out the parking garage, and that’s how we ended up here.”
For busy residents, the parking lot ended up being the perfect spot, he said, because they can park their cars on the top floor and check in on the garden as they come and go from work each day. And the vegetables couldn’t be happier.
In late June, residents had already begun to harvest lettuce and kale. Plump sugar snap peas hung from a trellis ready to go.
“It’s thriving even more than our home garden,” said Dr. Kapetanos. “I am so jealous,” added his wife, Dr. Yenny Cabrera-Kapetanos, who is also an internal medicine doctor at Allegheny General Hospital. Dr. Cabrera-Kapetanos was instrumental in developing the garden and planning out the plots, even starting seeds for the garden over the winter at the couple’s house in Cranberry.
Dr. Cabrera-Kapetanos gives a tour of the garden, pointing out zucchini, cherry tomatoes, melons, basil, and edible flowers to bring pollinators up to the top floor of the parking garage.
Dr. Huffman pulls peas and cuts lettuce with scissors, placing it in a bag that will be delivered to the hospital’s Healthy Food Center, which distributes food to patients along with nutrition lessons.
“I’ve seen so many patients who have told me they’ve gotten vegetables from our garden, and they’ve been so happy about it,” said Dr. Divya Venkat, a physician with Allegheny Health Network’s Center for Inclusion Health. Dr. Venkat, who grew up gardening with her parents in Las Vegas, started a community garden plot on the North Side when she was a resident at AGH to grow vegetables with other residents.
The garden plot on the parking garage has now been formalized into a curriculum for the residents, where they learn not only about tending the vegetable garden but also about how to talk to patients about diabetes and hypertension.
They are also working with the Healthy Food Center to develop simple recipes to accompany the garden foods, such as a recent one for vegetable chili using zucchini.
“The plan is for residents to think of a patient they are taking care of in their own clinic and say, oh, this is a patient who has food insecurity. I would like to bridge that divide,” said Dr. Venkat, “and physically hand them the food that is grown here with an accompanying recipe.”
Other hospitals, such as Boston Medical Center and the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, also have vegetable gardens that produce food for patients, although they are not run by residents.
In addition to producing vegetables and educating residents, the garden has had other benefits, helping to develop a new community within the hospital. “Once you start talking about gardening, all the gardeners come out of the woodwork,” said Dr. Kapetanos. “Like there’s a lady that works in cytology. I met her up here last week, and we’re exchanging seeds. She just emailed me and said I have those seeds, and I said, ‘I’ll get you my mom’s tomato seeds from Toronto.’”
And while it wasn’t in the plan when the garden was envisioned in 2018, it also became a sanctuary for doctors and residents during COVID-19.
“Indoors we were always wearing our masks and shields around the clock and spending long hours, and taking care of COVID patients as well, which was very stressful,” said Dr. Cabrera-Kapetanos. “It’s therapeutic, sometimes, just to come and start plucking weeds or pruning some of the plants. It’s nice and quiet up here.”
As COVID-19 intensified in the hospital, Dr. Venkat and other residents could take solace in the garden.
“COVID was so scary because you just watch so much death, right, there’s so much uncertainty,” she said. “I think everyone was pretty scared because no one knew what was going on with COVID, but this is a place that was outside, it was not contaminated, and no matter what, it is always living. It doesn’t matter if it’s raining, if it’s snowing, there’s always life in the garden, and it was a nice thing to have.”