STAYING IN TOU STUDENTS HELP WITH CONTACT TRACING CITYWIDE BY SHAWN RYAN
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very day for about a month, Stacey Wong pulled out her smartphone to text and call other students at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. She wasn’t always calling for a cheerful chat. She wanted to know how the person on the other end was feeling. How they were doing? How did they feel physically and mentally? Was there anything they needed? A fifth-level student in the School of Nursing at UTC, she was a critical element in stopping the spread of COVID-19 through contact tracing, reaching out to people who were either in quarantine or complete isolation after testing positive for the virus. “There is a lot of pressure to make sure it is done correctly because it could affect a lot of people,” Wong says. “It all comes down to making sure you are helping the person who is in isolation or quarantine and making sure to help keep the public safe.” Wong was one of 17 UTC students—nine seniors in nursing, eight in other majors—who performed contract tracing for the Hamilton County Health Department. For nursing students, it also was part of their curriculum in the Tennessee Volunteer Mobilizer Initiative. “This has become part of their clinical rotation in their community health course. This is the optimum experience for a community health nursing student,” says Susan Thul, associate professor for graduatelevel courses in the School of Nursing and the faculty member working with the contract tracing effort at UTC. “In our lifetime, they’ve never gotten the opportunity to see the importance of communityhealth nursing to this degree. I think it makes it even more important that we’re in our own UTC community,” she explains. Alexis Underwood, a fifth-level student in the School of Nursing, says she participated in contact tracing almost every day between Aug. 26 and Oct. 2. Some days were only a few minutes long; some were as much as eight hours, depending on the number of cases she handled.
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Alexis Underwood UTC.EDU/NURSING
