Page 24 - White Plains Hospital Annual Report 2020-2021

GOING THE EXTRA MILE
The team of WPH hospitalists battling COVID day in and day out saw it all—and handled it with grace.
Since the beginning of the COVID outbreak in March 2020, more than 500 coronavirus patients at White Plains Hospital have been cared for by members of the WPH hospitalist team. Hospitalists—doctors who focus on internal medicine
and provide general care in a hospital setting—are crucial clinicians at any time, but never more so than during the past year.
“Our hospitalists go the extra mile in the care of their patients routinely, but specifically during the COVID outbreak, they truly went above and beyond their call of duty,” says Dr. Rodney Ashir, the Director of WPH’s Department of Hospital Medicine.
Many of the hospitalists volunteered to be part of the COVID team, adds Dr. Ashir, stepping up to provide critical care for the sickest of patients right from the start, when confusion and fear over how the virus could spread was high.
“The first three months of the pandemic were really intense for us,” says Dr. Gina Cook, who has worked as a WPH hospitalist since 2018. “We had to take on the responsibility for this whole new disease that no one knew much about, without really knowing how to treat it or how to manage it.”
Information about coronavirus came rapidly and often haphazardly, and hospitalist Dr. Travis Howlette points out that there were no specialists to turn to for guidance. “Policy changes, treatment
recommendations, and guidelines for handling COVID-19 kept coming around the bend,” he says, “and there was no expert, no coronavirus specialist; whoever had been dealing with COVID-19 the longest was the expert of the day.” Howlette drew on his experiences coming from Elmhurst General Hospital in Queens, where conditions had been among some of the worst in the nation when he joined the WPH COVID team in the fall of 2020.
Being flexible and adjusting on the fly was crucial— and it came somewhat naturally to this group of hospitalists, says Dr. Kimberly Farrell, who came to WPH in 2018. “We are all fairly new doctors and where we were in our careers made it easier to adapt and roll with the punches. All of our medical training and all of residency is flipping a switch and being thrown into a new situation every few weeks, and we aren’t too far out from that,” she explains of their comfort level in managing the unknown nature of this disease.
“Our hospitalists go the extra mile in the care of their patients routinely, but specifically during the COVID outbreak, they truly went above and beyond their call of duty...”
— DR. RODNEY ASHIR —
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WHITE PLAINS HOSPITAL