Clinic looks ‘to take care of our community’
Drive-by testing being utilized for suspected coronavirus cases
The Dignity Health Woodland Clinic Medical Group has been preparing for the novel coronavirus pandemic since January, according to its Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Ashley Sens.
Operations at its three locations — the East Woodland campus in the Costco shopping center, across the street from Woodland Memorial Hospital and off West Covell Boulevard in Davis — have recently been altered to protect patients and staff.
One way they’ve done this is by conducting “virtual visits.”
“We’re changing how we provide care to keep people safe,” Sens said. “We have embraced
social distancing at Woodland Clinic to flatten the curve by converting the majority of our visits to phone or video visits. We’re only bringing patients into clinic who have underlying health conditions or are acutely ill and have to have a face-toface visit.”
They’ve also designated locations for specific purposes.
“We’ve turned the East Woodland campus into an acute ambulatory care center and that’s where we’re bringing anyone who is acutely ill and needs a face-to-face visit,” Sens said. “Our other two clinics are where we’re bringing patients in who need to be face-to-face but aren’t acutely ill so if we happen to see somebody in East Woodland with a cough or fever who may have COVID-19, we don’t have that patient in the same building as somebody who is elderly or has COPD or congestive heart failure.”
Drive-by testing for COVID-19 is being done at the East Woodland site.
“We’re testing anywhere from two to seven people a day and it’s by appointment only,” she explained. “The reason for this is because the availability of tests is still extremely low and so we’re tightly controlling it. The other thing is that the person who does the testing has to be in full PPE (personal protective equipment like masks and gloves) and because there’s a PPE shortage that’s as much a limiting factor as the tests are.
“We have PPE and we have tests but we’re being cautious about how we use them because we understand that the rest of the country is in limited supply and we don’t want to burn through our PPE just testing everybody,” Sens continued. “We would not be using our resources efficiently if we did that.”
Following current Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines, patients are being screened by staff and only those who are symptomatic and considered high-risk are being tested. It’s taking roughly five days to get results.
“It’s really slow and that’s because the labs are overwhelmed with testing which is another reason why we’re trying to be judicious on who we test,” Sens said.
For now, the plan is to keep all coronavirus-related activities at East Woodland.
“It’s a fairly big building and right now we have not seen a surge — it’s really quite quiet,” Sens noted. “We feel that we are very well prepared if a surge does come. We’ve got a good stockpile of PPE, we’ve got trained physicians, we’ve got two tents that we put up outside that we can also utilize if we need to.”
If employees becomes ill, the clinic has created a grid of all clinicians and staff that can be brought in as needed.
“We are prepared to take care of our community and have been preparing for this since January,” Sens said. “We didn’t just start last week. We are also very fortunate in Woodland to have a close relationship with our sister hospital so we’ve been coordinating with them as well for months to have a coordinated response for the whole community so both ambulatory and in-patient is on the same page.”
As of Friday afternoon, Yolo County had 13 confirmed cases of COVID-19 including one death.