‘It’s all hands on deck’
Admin turned nurse says Stamford Hospital has pulled together
STAMFORD — Before the new coronavirus outbreak, Irene Furlong held an administrative role at Stamford Hospital.
Now, she puts on a full set of personal protective equipment and swabs sick patients from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., collecting samples that will be tested for the virus caused by COVID-19.
“It’s all hands on deck to serve the patients in the community,” said Furlong, the director of Clinical Services at Stamford Health Medical Group.
The drive-thru facility at Stamford Hospital has operated for over a week now, and Furlong said she and her team are seeing about 100 people a day, for a total of 450 last week. The increase in testing is exactly what she hoped to see as the public-health messages got out to the community.
And “the more we test, the more positive cases we’re going to see,” she said.
Her team of of nurses, security staff and lab personnel — people who rarely would have interacted or worked together before — have united so well “you would think they had done this for 20 years,” Furlong said.
Amid rising concerns of hospital supply shortages, the drive-thru operation has not yet been impacted, she said.
“Right now, we have all the supplies we need to be functioning in a safe environment,” she said. “We have what’s needed to do our jobs.”
Gloves are a crucial part of that safe environment, essential as the novel coronavirus is spreading more quickly than other infectious diseases.
Furlong remembers having an administrative nursing role at Stamford Hospital when the Ebola outbreak happened.
“What we’re seeing now is that it’s far more contagious than other viruses and outbreaks over the years,” she said.
Still, potentially being exposed to COVID-19 at work does not bother her: At the hospital, she has access to personal protective equipment and the hospital has restricted visiting and screens everyone for symptoms.
“We have a high level of confidence,” Furlong said. “But at the grocery store? Who knows.”
She gave a vote of lowconfidence to the information that people are seeing online — unscientific, inaccurate information that nonetheless scares people.
On Facebook and Instagram, she has seen inaccurate numbers of how many people are dying and home remedies to keep people from getting the novel coronavirus.
In part, that is because the disease is new and there are still many unknowns.
“We have to put our trust in our health care system,” she said. “This is so widespread and it’s affecting everyone, in every community and every state.”
Furlong said she hopes people keep things in perspective, remain calm, take care of themselves and protect themselves.
“There are some rough patches, but we’ll get through this,” she said.
To continue following orders to stay home while staying sane, Furlong said she generally tries to keep up her routines by finding different ways to do them, such as going on walks and runs when she cannot go to the gym.
Furlong said she has taken comfort in the community response she has experienced first-hand, and the way in which being told to stay away from each other has brought people closer together.
“Out here on the forefront, patients are so appreciative and thankful and have been so kind to all the nurses and staff working there,” she said. “They have acknowledged that this is our job as a health care professional, but they see it as going above and beyond. To me that’s very heartwarming.”