FEATURE
Forging International Care Connections During the Delta Surge: A Reflection on Providing COVID-19 Medical Relief to India Sanjay Pattani, MD, FACEP, MHSA FCEP President and Associate Chief Medical Officer at AdventHealth Orlando
Just as Florida came off its second COVID-19 surge this past spring and mass vaccination efforts were in full swing, the Delta variant began ravaging India. The headlines of death and despair dominated the news, and the impact on one of the most populous countries in the world was devastating. At its peak in early May, India experienced one of the largest COVID-19 surges the world had seen, with more than 400,000 new infections and 4,000 deaths reported each day. These were more than headlines to me. They hit close to my home and heart. My parents are first-generation immigrants from India, and I continue to have deep roots in the country. Many of my relatives are still there, including two of my cousins who are primary care physicians. I also have numerous physician colleagues I have met and stayed connected with over the years who live and work in India. As this new stage of the pandemic progressed, I kept hearing more and more first-hand accounts from my family and friends about the tragedies they were seeing and experiencing each day. My wife’s best friend’s grandmother died without family being able to conduct the usual and customary Hindu ceremony and cremation. Listening to all of their fear and suffering broke my heart and propelled me to find a way to do something to help.
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was experiencing some of the same issues we had in the U.S. during our first two COVID-19 surges but with a significantly different and hugely underfunded healthcare infrastructure. The country has almost no emergency medical services (EMS) system — just getting patients to the hospital is a huge barrier to accessing care. Compounding the challenge, severe staff and supply shortages plagued India’s hospitals before the Delta variant hit. As the virus surged, the healthcare system rapidly became overrun. Two of the greatest challenges that emerged were capacity and lack of oxygen. Quite literally, millions of sick people were starving for air. I am a physician, trained in emergency medicine, serving as associate chief medical officer for AdventHealth Orlando, a quaternary hospital in the U.S. As an American doctor, I have access to the very best medical resources and the ability to provide the highest level of patient care. In medical training, we are taught to be proactive, to do no harm and to never give up. I also have an innate humanitarian desire to help others. That is what drew me to a career in medicine in the first place. As the Delta variant was consuming my family’s homeland, I knew I had skills, knowledge, financial resources and the desire to help, but how could I from such a distance? It was an overwhelming and paralyzing feeling.
The Challenge
Developing a Plan to Provide Relief
From a medical standpoint, India
Despite the initial despair, I knew EMpulse Winter 2022
I wasn’t alone in my quest to do something to help. When the warning signals began ringing in India early last spring, my AdventHealth colleagues in Central Florida began discussing how we could apply the basic principles we knew as physicians to deliver some sort of relief in a compassionate way. However, with each idea we generated, we encountered obstacles, including travel restrictions, supply chain issues, limited manpower and government regulations. Finding the right contacts and resources would be essential to launching a successful disaster relief effort. At AdventHealth, I am blessed to work for a faith-based organization whose breadth and depth extends into various programs such as AdventHealth Global Missions. They already had relationships with a number of hospitals in India and helped us to establish direct communication with these healthcare providers to learn how we could best support their most urgent needs. One of the most heartbreaking things we learned during these initial outreach and conversations was that at some hospitals, despite the tremendous influx of COVID-19 patients, some ventilators were sitting unused simply because of a lack of available oxygen. With input from our colleagues on the frontlines in India, we decided to focus our combined relief efforts on two critical areas of need: 1) supplies and equipment, including personal protective equipment (PPE) and
