In Loving Memory
An SSM Health employee pays tribute to her late colleague by giving back.
It was with a heavy heart that Donna Spears, director of maternal-fetal medicine for SSM Health in St. Louis, created The Judy Project in memory of her late friend and co-worker Judy Wilson-Griffin, a perinatal clinical nurse specialist who was the first person in St. Louis County to die of COVID-19. Through the project, Spears has raised $2,500 and provided 2,000 hand-sewn masks to staff and patients of SSM Health Family Birth Places and maternal-fetal medicine clinics across the St. Louis region.
The Medical Network
Starting a global conversation about the pandemic’s effect on people with MS
When the COVID-19 pandemic began, Dr. Barry Singer and Dr. Melanie Huff of the MS Center for Innovations in Care were concerned about how the virus would affect people with multiple sclerosis. Singer began reaching out to colleagues around the globe and started the hashtag #MSCOVID19 on Twitter. Tweets from both medical professionals and patients began pouring in. Now, Singer says the center’s focus is ensuring that MS patients can still receive comprehensive care, even if it’s virtual.
The World Works in Mysterious Ways
In 1990, Dr. Robert Poirier was tasked with solving an epidemic to come in 2020. Now, he’s living it.
In 1990, Dr. Robert Poirier, then a high schooler, joined a problem-solving team at his school in Rhode Island. One of the topics he addressed: How to solve an epidemic to come in the year 2020. Now, he's treating COVID-19 patients as the clinical chief of the emergency department at Barnes-Jewish Hospital.
The Future Problem Solving Program International is an academic program that encourages students and teachers to tackle potential issues or new realities. Like a debate team, students work in teams to address the topic at hand and then present their solutions in a paper.
"These are important exercises," Poirier says, "we should be doing it yearly. It should be a part of our risk mitigation strategies, no matter what profession."
For his high school competition, Poirier and his team, fortuitously, chose a topic and the year it would happen. When faced with the proposed epidemic for 2020, high school senior Poirier predicted technology would drastically advance in the next 30 years. The team researched the 1918 influenza, as many medical professionals have done this year. They addressed questions the nation is facing today: How would we isolate and quarantine a community? A country? How would we mobilize to find a cure or a treatment? How would the country enforce protocols, and what are the ethics of forcing people to do things they may not want to do? They discussed how to best educate the public on hygiene. They brainstormed ways to coordinate the manufacturing of needed medical supplies or tools the public could use to prevent the spread. They even discussed how to retrain the unemployed to help the government with tracing and containment of the virus.
"Although, we felt by 2020, computers would be advanced enough to track and trace," Poirier says, "which is very important in preventing the spread of a viral-based epidemic."
His team won and went on to the program's national finals. He remembers flying into St. Louis, where the national competition was held, on June 7, 1990. Nine years later, he returned to the city as an emergency medicine resident at Washington University School of Medicine and worked at Barnes Jewish Hospital and St. Louis Children's Hospital. Throughout his career, he's been a part of a number of clinical trials relating to new antiviral and medications for influenza.
Now at Barnes, he's still problem-solving: "We didn't know exactly how the coronavirus would play out in our region," he says. The hospital first focused on preventive measures for staff, then stopped elective surgeries to free up the hospital space. The emergency department also saw a drop in patients.
"The world works in mysterious ways," Poirier says. "Even though I had forgotten a little bit about the competition, I think it stayed with me and was the reason why I spent time as a principal investigator working on all these influenza trials over the last 15 years."
A Timely Gift
A SLU alumnus boosts his alma mater’s work toward a vaccine.
SLU is one of only nine federally funded Vaccine and Treatment Evaluation Units, charged with conducting phases one through four of vaccine and treatment trials. A new gift that will help its Center for Vaccine Development with a COVID-19 treatment: $750,000 from alumnus Dr. Stephen C. Peiper and his wife, Dr. Zi-Xuan “Zoe” Wang. For Peiper, who graduated in 1977, the gift is personal: “As I’ve gotten more advanced in my career, I’ve realized that you always have to remember who you came to the dance with.”
That’s the Spirit
A surgeon’s side gig proves fundamental in helping frontline workers.
After the COVID-19 pandemic forced hospitals to pause nonessential surgeries, Dr. William Schroer and his fellow St. Louis Distillery co-owners found a new purpose: producing hand sanitizer. First the distillery provided the sanitizer to skilled nursing centers, senior living centers, and first responders; then it sent bottles to area restaurants, hotels, and customers. As of early June, Schroer was slowly getting back to work and anticipating that he’d be busier than ever serving those who’d had to push back procedures.
Safety First
A Mercy doctor’s COVID-19 innovation helps protect frontline workers.
Mercy Hospital hit upon an innovation in its treatment of COVID patients with the creation of a “bubble,” a tarp draped over patients that allows physicians to safely perform tracheotomies with less worry about the spread of infection. Dr. Alison Gildehaus and her team were inspired by the boxes being made in China to similarly protect health care professionals. “This was really a concerted effort to bring the operating room up,” Gildehaus says, “so that we didn’t have to move the patient outside of their room.”
Protecting Caregivers
With masks in demand, Mercy uses technology to bolster its supply.
At the same time that many local designers and makers were helping produce personal protective equipment for frontline workers, Mercy found another solution. This year, researchers identified Altapure, a no-touch disinfection system that Mercy previously used to clean patient rooms, as an efficient means of sanitizing PPE. Since late March, Mercy has used the hydrogen peroxide misting equipment to kill viruses and bacteria on a roomful of masks in just an hour and a half, sterilizing as many as 2,500 masks a day.
Shedding Light
A St. Luke’s doctor looks to UV light to decontaminate N95 respirators.
After a University of Nebraska protocol for using ultraviolet light to decontaminate N95 respirators was published in a peer-reviewed journal, Dr. Bobby Shah, a pulmonologist at St. Luke’s Hospital, brought the idea to St. Louis.
“Within days, we were able to quickly put together the resources to identify a room, prepare the room, and create a system similar to what was being done at Nebraska,” Shah says.
He sent the information to the hospital’s Incident Command Center, which put him in charge of a committee to evaluate options and make formal recommendations to the team that had been coordinating and planning everything COVID-19–related.
“Our primary goal was the safety of our patients and our health care workers,” Shah says. “Masks were processed and returned to the same staff members to be worn again. The original goal was no more than five treatments per mask to keep the necessary filtration efficiency and ensure the masks function as needed.”
At press time, the hospital had an adequate supply and was seeing less demand for N95 respirators, so they decided to discontinue reprocessing masks for the time being.
