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A year of service and patient care, unlike any other.
The novel coronavirus pandemic arrived like a storm front in early March 2020. From Gainesville to Jacksonville, to Central Florida and locations around the state, University of Florida Health caregivers stepped up to their posts even as the world around them isolated from contagion.
And the patients came, first in a trickle, and then in larger numbers as the tide of COVID-19 ebbed and flowed throughout the year. They came from Gainesville and throughout Florida and, in a few cases, from across the country for a fighting chance at recovery.
Jill Holker, a healthy and active ICU nurse from Utah without any medical problems putting her at high-risk of a severe case of COVID-19, turned to UF Health Shands Hospital when COVID-19 nearly killed her. UF Health surgeons performed a double-lung transplant on Jan. 20, 2021.
About a month later, as a crowd of UF Health staffers cheered, Holker was discharged.
“This hospital is great,” she said. “There’s a handful of people who I feel were really fighting for me, like sincerely fighting for me. And it’s a staff, it’s people who never knew me. And I think that’s one of my biggest takeaways, that this place has a lot of caring people.”
Throughout the coronavirus crisis, UF Health responded by offering its best to get patients like Holker back to their loved ones.
The herculean effort to treat patients fighting for their lives while simultaneously trying to get a handle on the rising number of cases in Florida started, in a sense, at The Villages®. UF Health provided some of the earliest coronavirus testing in Florida to high-risk seniors at the sprawling Central Florida development. It was an early effort to come to grips with how the fast-spreading pandemic was ravaging this vulnerable population.
Medical volunteers perform COVID-19 test swabs
At the onset of the pandemic, UF Health Jacksonville swiftly worked with local and state health and emergency management officials to begin offering COVID-19 testing for Duval County residents who were at risk of being disproportionately affected by the virus, completing thousands of tests in short order.
As physicians and nurses within the COVID-19 units at UF Health Shands Hospital tried to make sense of the new ways of working, treating very sick and frightened patients who could not have visitors and who often were not allowed their medications, new care strategies emerged. A team of “champions” at the hospital was among the first in the nation to develop strategies for combating delirium in elderly COVID-19 patients, an all-too-common complication in the coronavirus pandemic. Among their innovations: Connecting isolated patients to family via iPADs.
New technologies also emerged. UF Health became one of the first in the world to use a novel diaphragmatic neurostimulator to help coronavirus patients breathe easier, greatly reducing their time on a ventilator.
With the temporary transvenous diaphragmatic neurostimulator, a central line goes into a vein under the patient’s left collarbone. It contains electrodes that stimulate the phrenic nerves responsible for spurring the diaphragm to contract. This creates negative pressure ventilation, helping to mimic a more natural way of breathing in tandem with the positive pressure caused by the ventilator.
UF Health leaders moved quickly to ramp up telehealth services. UF Health Central Florida clinicians began treating patients during the last week in March. Staffed by an advanced practice provider, the telehealth programs served as critical primary care access points, both for COVID-19 and other concerns, ultimately providing patients with a sense of confidence knowing they could be treated in the comfort of their home.
Systemwide, telehealth services at UF Health exploded, rising 7,385% in the early months of the pandemic.
“This hospital is great. There’s a handful of people who I feel were really fighting for me, like sincerely fighting for me. And it’s a staff, it’s people who never knew me. And I think that’s one of my biggest takeaways, that this place has a lot of caring people.”
Throughout the health care system, caregivers were there to ease the pain of those who battled the virus but also to celebrate the amazing stories of patients who managed to defeat the invisible enemy.
Enell “Trent’’ Porter and his family were celebrating his new lease on life in February after he received a new heart and a kidney in back-to-back transplants at UF Health Shands Hospital. But the family took another body blow when Porter and then his wife, Irish, and their 5-year-old son Caleb all were diagnosed with COVID-19.
Trent and Irish Porter in a family photo.
Six days later, Porter emerged from a medically induced coma and all three became part of a special and growing group: UF Health patients who survived COVID-19.
UF Health Jacksonville led the way in punching back against the pandemic when it vaccinated the first person in Florida against COVID-19 in December. Health care workers there and at UF Health sites in Gainesville and Central Florida began getting vaccinated immediately.
Dr. Leon L. Haley Jr., a board-certified emergency room physician, CEO of UF Health Jacksonville and dean of the UF College of Medicine – Jacksonville, is thought to be the first in Florida to be vaccinated.
UF Health Jacksonville has been vaccinating leaders of faith-based organizations since January, garnering their support to help overcome any hesitancy among members of their congregations and the community at large.
UF Health also is working closely with community leaders in Alachua County, including pastors of Black churches and other faith-based and cultural groups in East Gainesville and beyond, to expand access to vaccines and to address vaccination hesitancy. The goal is to equitably distribute vaccines while reaching those people who are most at risk of COVID-19.
And the team continues to work closely with the state Department of Health in Alachua County to vaccinate residents ages 65 and older, including helping staff the largest vaccination effort to date in the county at UF’s Ben Hill Griffin Stadium.
Until the storm passes, UF Health caregivers remain on the front lines ready to give the best of themselves.