Whether they’re toiling on the front lines or helping from the sidelines, healthcare workers are navigating a strange new world in the pandemic age. We’ve all read stories about doctors and nurses working to exhaustion as COVID-19 strains our healthcare system. But there are other stories that, while less daunting and dramatic, tease out some nuanced lessons about public health and community welfare. We asked five people, from doctors to technical specialists to medical students, to express in their own words what they’ve learned during their work amid the pandemic. Answers have been edited for length and clarity.
GIGI GUIZADO DE NATHAN STANDARDIZED PATIENT COORDINATOR IN THE CLINICAL SIMULATION CENTER OF LAS VEGAS
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hat Gigi Guizado de Nathan has learned from the pandemic comes from her unique background. For some 20 years (10 in Las Vegas), she’s educated standardized patients. What’s that? Imagine a scenario in which a medical or nursing school student is being trained or tested through a simulated interaction with a patient — kind of like role-playing. Who plays the sick person? An actor, called a standardized patient. Guizado de Nathan got her formal education in acting and has continued to act alongside her day job overseeing the local SP program. In addition, she’s bilingual, having been raised speaking Spanish.
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AUGUST 2020
LAS VEGAS NEEDS M U LT I L I N G U A L M E D I C A L E D U C AT I O N
The process started with all our events getting canceled one by one, because the learners could not congregate, for their own health. The university shut everything down. The Simulation Center was among the first invited to reopen, because healthcare education was considered essential. We need to be graduating as many healthcare workers as we can. That process must not be slowed down. We went back to the drawing board and started to reimagine how we deliver a modality so based on human interaction, physical touch, being in the room with someone, and giving them feedback on the nuances. We needed a simulation about COVID-19. People had thought of that and written it, but it was intended for use with an avatar, AI, or mannequin. The thing that struck me about it was, I can look at this and reimagine it with a live human being, but also, what occurred to me, because of my perspective as a bilingual, bicultural person was, it was all geared toward native English speakers. In Las Vegas, we have a large percent of our population for whom English is not the primary language. And also, we invite people from around the world — our economy is based on tourism — who don’t speak English as their first language. When the pandemic hits and you have a multilingual population and a virus that doesn’t discriminate, how will healthcare professionals help them? So, I wrote a simulation to address that. NECESSITY IS THE MOTHER OF INVENTION
Visually, it’s not unlike what we’re looking at right now — Skype or Zoom. The scenario is, a patient who is ill, a Las Vegas resident whose first language is not English, calls the UNLV School of Medicine COVID-19 call center, because they’re sick. Assuming they have a medical interpreter, they have another person (a physician) come into the meeting and then the conversation continues with the interpreter. It becomes a three-way call. I train the bilingual standardized patient so the medical student can see how to engage that person effectively and have the skills they need to help that patient. I’ve been pleasantly surprised and reminded of how much we can accomplish if we D E S E R T C O M P A N I O N .V E G A S