Sitters network helping frontline health workers
Claire Unruh felt useless. A fourth-year medical student at Ross University, she was months from graduating. Rotations had been canceled or moved online. All nonessential personnel were sent home. Her global health elective in Zimbabwe was no more, and the book about Zimbabwe her brother gave her for Christmas sat idly on her desk.
Unruh saw it coming. During her infectious disease rotation, she asked the doctors every day how the coronavirus would affect the hospital. She never finished the rotation in person.
From her apartment in Detroit, Unruh constantly refreshed Facebook. She watched news flood in and numbers of cases climb until she felt so sick she had to shut off her computer. She tried to sew masks, but her sewing machine broke.
“I started feeling more and more awful,” said Unruh, 30. “I felt guilty and useless that I wasn’t there and able to help out.”
Scrolling through her Facebook feed once again, Unruh found posts from other Ross students about a volunteer network called COVIDsitters. She signed up immediately.
The doctors who were doing the work Unruh wanted to be part of were struggling even during their off hours. Many were scrambling to arrange child care, buy groceries or find someone to walk the dog. COVIDsitter initiatives across the country have stepped up to help, matching medical professionals with med student volunteers who babysit, tutor and run errands.
“In a competition between family and career, family always wins,” said Hala Sabry, an emergency medical physician in California. “Now, if I choose family, patients die. But COVIDsitters is the antidote.”
Sabry, founder of Physician Moms Group, teamed up with the medical apparel company Medelita to create an online directory for the COVIDsitter programs, more of which were launching every day. Their website includes 21 COVIDsitter organizations.
“This field can be a sterile and hierarchical environment,” Sabry said. “And these volunteers singlehandedly broke that barrier down and told us, ‘It’s OK. We’ll take care of you right now.’ ”
When schools closed, Stephanie Hall, a single mom and pediatric medical assistant at a doctor’s office in Davisburg, Michigan, didn’t know what to do with her 6-year-old son, Ryan.
“All of us were kind of like, ‘What do we do?’ ” she said. “It’s been super overwhelming and stressful.”
Hall couldn’t take time off work and had to organize babysitting every day. She was also in charge of homeschooling.
Ryan, who has ADHD, struggled to focus until Hall edited lessons into digestible 10-minute chunks.
Her doctor’s office was seeing only 10 patients a day instead of its usual 150, so Hall wondered if she would be able to pay her bills, as well as paying for babysitting and extra meals for Ryan, who got free lunch at school.
At the end of her rope, Hall got a call from a medical student at her office, who told her about COVIDsitters. She signed up at the end of March, and by April, she matched with Unruh.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Unruh arrives at Hall's house at 8 a.m. She makes Ryan breakfast while he watches WWE wrestling videos on YouTube. They play Fortnite together and jump on Ryan’s trampoline. Unruh makes him lunch, helps him with his homework and logs him onto video calls with his teacher. For 20 hours a week, Hall doesn’t have to worry about her son or spend on extra babysitting. “It’s two days a week of my life that I’m not scrambling,” she said.
For Unruh, babysitting Ryan is the best part of her week – a welcome respite from self-isolating in an apartment in metro Detroit.
Unruh's sights are set on family medicine, so babysitting could also offer a chance to gain experience working with children and an opportunity to see what life as a physician looks like outside the hospital.
“It’s kind of just the core of wanting to be in this field, as cliche as it sounds,” Unruh said. “It’s to help people, to help in whatever way you can.”