“I Didn’t Do a Good Enough Job Anticipating Demand.” What It’s Like Working a Drive-Thru COVID-19 Testing Center
On average, every 3.5 calls to the ProHEALTH COVID-19 testing hotline ends up in a drive thru visit. Once there, patients are met by a greeter, who verifies their appointment and assigns them to a parking space. A five-person team—a nurse practitioner, physician assistant and doctor as well as two medical assistants—comes to the car fully gowned and covered in protective gear from head to toe.
They immediately learned one lesson after day one: although it’s challenging to gear up and remove protective equipment, it’s better to have more health care providers working shorter shifts. “I’m an emergency room doctor, so I’m used to 12 hour shifts,” says Dr. Bonnie Simmons, medical director of urgent care at ProHEALTH, who worked a 15 hour shift on the first day the drive thru opened. “Those N95 [face masks] definitely make you feel tired and spacey, and make breathing difficult. People can’t hear you as well, so you speak louder. And after several hours of yelling through the mask for patients to hear—that’s exhausting.
Another critical take-away was that health care workers can’t afford to dispose of their entire protective gear after each patient, as they’re technically supposed to, since they may run out of supplies. Technicians at ProHEALTH are changing gloves after each patient, but if the Haz-Mat suits aren’t damaged or compromised, the health care workers spray each other down with bleach solutions before taking off the suits for bathroom and food breaks.
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