Special pathogens unit

From page 1 everybody to our capability and to our preparedness level.”

None of the four COVID patients brought to the unit had severe symptoms. They were released within the 28 days that the unit was activated. As more people were hospitalized later with severe cases of COVID, the unit was used as treatment space for the overflow of patients.

Sharing their work

This spring, after the federal government lifted the public health emergency, Providence opened the doors to the highly specialized unit for media tours. The system wanted people to learn about how the unit works so they could understand how it was used, and how it may be used in the future.

Health leaders and federal partners look at specific criteria to determine when to activate and deactivate special pathogen units.

The units’ origins go back to the Ebola outbreak in 2014 and 2015, when Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, the University of Nebraska Medical Center/Nebraska Medicine, and NYC Health + Hospitals/ Bellevue in New York were tasked with caring for patients in the United States. Ebola first spread in parts of Africa, where more than 11,000 people died. Fewer than a dozen people were treated for it in the United States, where two people died.

The Ebola outbreak prompted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to partner with public health departments to create more regional facilities that would be able to respond in the event of a similar outbreak. Congress approved funding to establish the centers.

The Washington State Department of Health encouraged Sacred Heart to apply for funding. The hospital had the space and the willingness to invest in training and preparedness. Its unit opened in 2015, and generally serves Alaska, Idaho, Oregon and

Washington.

Special equipment

The unit is 14,000 square feet, with 12 ICU-level rooms with negative airflow to contain pathogens. There’s in-room video to help monitor and communicate with patients and caregivers, as well as a biosafety lab to contain potentially infectious samples. An isolated area stores dedicated supplies and personal protective equipment and has rooms for putting on and removing the gear.

The unit also has a San-I-Pak, which is a sterilizer that allows workers to inactivate waste that may carry an infectious substance. Without the sterilizer, the waste would have to be taken to an off-site incinerator.

The number of patients the unit can hold at one time depends on the pathogen involved. The unit can hold only two patients with Ebola or viral hemorrhagic fever because of the space needed to isolate them at a high level. The unit can care for up to 12 patients who have a respiratory pathogen with a lower acuity.

Prepared for a pandemic

Arguinchona was at a meeting in January 2020 unrelated to COVID with colleagues from the other regional treatment centers when they started carefully monitoring the novel virus seen in Wuhan, China. Because the Spokane unit’s staff had been regularly training for years, preparations for their first patients went smoothly.

“This happened to be an emerging novel pathogen that we really didn’t know much about yet,” she said. “So, it was a perfect use of our space and our expertise.”

She said that no staffers contracted COVID during the unit’s activation — a testament to their preparedness.

About 90 staffers, who otherwise work elsewhere in the hospital, are specially trained to work in the unit. They include nurses, doctors, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, respiratory therapists, medical laboratory scientists and environmental services personnel. They get regular training and can mobilize within eight hours if they are asked to receive a patient with a high-consequence infectious disease. They all chose to work in the unit.

The unit’s staff partners with those in other regional centers to educate and train one another. This March, they completed a training exercise with another health care system in the Spokane area as well as with other local and state agencies. Now, they are working with the other regional centers to focus on prevention of disease spread.

Arguinchona called the time during the unit’s activation challenging, but not scary. “I would say we were confident, and we were ready,” she said. “And I’m confident that we would feel the same way again, if we were activated for another pathogen.”

Thomas Barnett is a nurse who joined the special pathogens team around the time it started and found it especially rewarding to be part of a new program at the hospital. He serves as a team leader and takes part in quarterly trainings.

“A lot of my colleagues I’ve worked with, I’ve tried to get them to join and they were like, ‘Do you really want to take care of an

Ebola patient if they come?’”

Barnett said his response is: “The way I look at it, I’m getting the best training to be safe. It’s not that I want to take care of somebody who is really contagious, but I know how to do it.”

When he and his colleagues in the unit learned in 2020 they would get some of the first COVID patients, they felt ready. “It was almost like a nervous excitement,” he said. “Like, OK, we don’t know what this virus is just yet, but I did feel very confident that we had all the right equipment. We’d had lots of training. We were familiar with the unit we were using.”

Preparing for the future

Leaders of the National Emerging Special Pathogens Training and Education Center, the coordinating body for the National Special Pathogens System, said in a statement that they are proud to have members of the Sacred Heart unit in its ranks. The leaders added that they “remain grateful that the Providence Sacred Heart special pathogens unit will continue to join NETEC and the nation’s 12 other RESPTCs (Regional Emerging Special Pathogen Treatment Centers) in setting the gold standard for special pathogens care, protecting the lives and security of millions of Americans in the process.”

“We

— Christa Arguinchona

Taking on the responsibility of the special pathogens unit is one way Sacred Heart fulfills its mission as a Catholic hospital, Arguinchona pointed out.

“We are very committed to our mission, and our mission is to care for our community and to care for those that are vulnerable,” especially those with infectious diseases, she said. “We can’t control who walks through our doors, and we want to be prepared for whoever is sent to us needing that care.” vhahn@chausa.org

PRESIDENTS/CEOS

Julie Lautt to interim president and CEO of Sioux Falls, South Dakota-based Avera Health. She also will continue in her role as Avera chief financial officer. In April Avera announced that President and CEO Bob Sutton would step down due to a serious medical condition.

Jackie Harris to president and CEO of Trinity Health Senior Communities. Previously she was president and CEO of Integrace, a senior living provider in the greater Washington, D.C., area. Prior to heading

Internships for minority students

From page 1 awareness of and to steer them toward those roles, while also providing a needed morale boost to the students’ mentors on staff, say executives heading the programs.

“From the student perspective, they’re exposed to the health care field, and seeing it in action … and this is showing them that this is within their reach,” says Dr. Lynn Jeffers, chief medical officer of CommonSpirit’s Dignity Health — St. John’s Regional Medical Center in Oxnard, California, and Dignity Health — St. John’s Hospital Camarillo in California. She says from the hospitals’ perspective, “We’re serving the community in a new way. And this is reinspiring the people involved about why they went into health care in the first place.”

Saida Selene Espinoza is the program director of a similar effort at a CommonSpirit hospital about 1,600 miles away at CHI Health Midlands hospital near Omaha, Nebraska. She says through that hospital’s internship programs, Hispanic students “are seeing it is possible to dream big, and they don’t have to let their background be a limiting factor” in their future careers.

Unequal access

Espinoza says there were several sources of inspiration for the Omaha-area program. For one, when she assisted with a COVID19 vaccination program at a local meatpacker, she saw a lack of Spanish-speaking health care professionals available to serve the majority-Hispanic workers getting the vaccine. In subsequent talks with others at CHI Health facilities and with the Latino Center of the Midlands, she learned there is a lack of diversity in staff across Omaha’s health care sector and that is causing a

Integrace, Harris had been president and CEO of Trinity Health Senior Communities from 2001 to 2009.

Kerry Alys Robinson to president and CEO of Catholic Charities USA. She had been a Leadership Roundtable executive partner.

Administrative Changes

Dr. Kevin L. Lewis to senior vice president and chief physician executive of Hospital Sisters Health System of Springfield, Illinois, effective Aug. 28.

Sr. Lisa Maurer, OSB, to director of mission integration and formation at Duluth Benedictine Ministries, the new ministerial public juridic person for the Benedictine Sisters of St. Scholastica Monastery in Duluth, about topics prioritized by the workers. a yearlong internship. The interns go to the hospital for several hours once a week for two semesters. They spend the fall semester circulating among numerous hospital departments, including the intensive care unit, emergency department, physical therapy, respiratory therapy, pharmacy and radiology. They then focus on three preferred departments for the spring semester. All along they are paired with a physician mentor. The college students take a biology course at their school while participating in the hospital internship.

The other internship, started in 2021 with another installment of mission and ministry funding, is the health career shadowing program. Hispanic high school and college students get an introduction to health care, are paired with mentors and spend time shadowing clinicians at CHI Health Midlands.

Students apply online for the programs, provide a letter of recommendation from their school, take part in a phone interview and then are selected for participation.

Students from both the community health worker and health care careers tracks can apply to move on to a certified nursing assistant program. It includes coursework at a local college, practical experience at CHI Health Midlands and assistance from a recruiter with job placement at CHI Health after the student is certified. Students have the opportunity to pursue other health care careers at CHI Health after becoming a CNA.

Minnesota.

Darren Henson to CHA senior director, ministry formation in the association’s Sponsorship and Mission Services department.

CommonSpirit hospitals in Camarillo and Oxnard replicated the program and began their own cohorts this past year. Another system facility, in Long Beach, is considering doing so.

Win-win-win-win

chasm between providers and patients.

Espinoza adds that populations have self-segregated in Omaha. She says students at high schools serving the mostly white areas traditionally have had much more access to health care career programs than students at high schools serving minority communities.

Collaborating with Omaha Public Schools and the nonprofit Latino Center, Espinoza and colleague Lucia Rodriguez Alvizo developed two paid internship programs designed to help increase CHI Health’s diversity. Rodriguez Alvizo is Healthier Communities & Community Benefit coordinator for CHI Health, Omaha. CHI has 14 hospital campuses in and around Omaha; most of the internship activity is at the CHI Health Midlands campus.

One internship program, started in 2019 with CHI Mission and Ministry Fund grant dollars, recruits Hispanic high school students to be community health interns, shadowing CHI Health Midlands community health workers. The interns communicate with, educate and provide resources to Hispanic community members, especially

Fewer than 20 students total can participate annually in the two internship programs. Espinoza says a goal is to increase the programs’ capacity.

From reflection to action

Similar programming in CommonSpirit’s Southern California region began at Dignity Health — Glendale Memorial Hospital and Health Center. In early 2021, colleagues there viewed the documentary Black Men in White Coats for Black History Month and were challenged to reflect on the lack of Black representation on clinical staffs in the U.S. and what they could do about it.

Rev. Cassie McCarty, the Glendale hospital’s director of mission integration and spiritual care services, explains that hospital leadership came up with the idea of an internship for students in underrepresented groups, including those of racial and ethnic minority status, those who identify as part of the LGBTQ+ population and those who are first in their family to go to college as well as those with lower socioeconomic status.

The resulting program that began in late 2021 has local high school and community college students applying to participate in

Those involved with the minority internship programs in the Omaha and Southern California regions say the initiatives are a win not just for the students but also for the facilities and their staffs, patients and community members.

Rev. McCarty in Glendale says many participating students had not previously known about the variety of roles available in a hospital. Jeffers in Oxnard and Camarillo notes that many students hadn’t considered that they could pursue hospital roles.

Espinoza in Omaha says that it’s important for minority students to have mentors whose backgrounds, life experiences, language, family life and faith are similar to their own. This helps them see themselves in the roles their mentors hold.

In Omaha, Gustavo Servin-Maciel is the Siembra Salud program coordinator at the Latino Center. Seimbra Salud translates to “sowing health.” He says through the shadowing programs, students are believing in themselves, getting out of their comfort zones and building the essential soft skills they’ll need throughout their future careers, whether or not they work in health care. Rodriguez Alvizo, with Omaha’s CHI Health, says students who are interested in health care roles are gaining career readiness through shadowing.

While the initiatives in both the Omaha and Southern California regions are new, both promise to in time boost the pipeline of candidates for health care positions at a time of widespread worker shortages.

And, facilities, patients and communities will benefit as staffs get more diverse, those interviewed say. Rev. McCarty notes the documentary that inspired the Southern California program shows that if patients don’t see themselves in their providers, they can lose trust in them. Conversely, when patients see themselves in their providers, they may develop more trusting relationships which can lead to better patient health, she says.

Jeffers in Southern California says a perhaps unanticipated benefit of the programming has been the positive impact on staff members who are mentoring the interns. Rev. McCarty agrees that the addition of fresh, young, motivated and curious minds has been energizing for the facilities. jminda@chausa.org