Rookie Nurses are on the Front Line of the Pandemic, and Some Still Have Homework

Essential employees like student nurses are still expected to show up for work while most other students are studying and working from home. And nurses acknowledge it’s daunting to enter such a competitive field during a pandemic.

Haley Rhoads is a patient transport and care technician in the emergency department at Aultman Hospital’s main campus. That means she’s responsible for admitting patients from the emergency room into regular hospital rooms. But she says the emergency room has seen a very low volume of patients since the pandemic began.

“Not only have a lot of peoples’ hours been cut, but they’re asking us to take on other duties to purposefully manage time,” Rhoads said. “There’s not a whole lot of patients coming in who actually need help.”

Rhoads also studies psychology at Stark State. She first applied to Aultman to work in their psychiatric unit but was told if she got a position in a different department she could transfer to the psych floor after a year. “Then I ended up in the emergency room. They got rid of their psych unit so I could no longer go to the psychiatric floor, but then I ended up working at the ER,” Rhoads said. The role ended up being a blessing in disguise. “It’ll be two years in June. I really like it,” she said.

As an essential employee, Rhoads was able to keep her job despite the low demand. She said she feels badly for her peers who have lost their jobs, but she also appreciates those who are still working. “Everyone is just as important as the other whether you’re in health care or a grocery store worker,” Rhoads said. “But sometimes it’s hard to find a balance between the massive amount of schoolwork and the added stress that the virus has had on the work life.”

Rhoads said she is personally in contact with multiple people who tested positive. Aultman updates its staff daily with best practices and resources to avoid spreading germs to family members. They recently began allowing nurses to shower and discard their work clothing before they leave to go home. But she said Aultman – like many other hospitals – is short on the personal protective equipment (PPE) nurses use to interact with patients.

“When everything first started I don’t think any of the hospitals were as prepared as they should have been,” Rhoads said. “We ran out of the specific gowns we needed quite fast and we were using backups until the backups ran out.”

The situation is similar for masks, which Rhoads said are occasionally sent out for cleaning. But a mask can only be sanitized three times before it should be discarded. “As far as protocols go, we have to reuse surgical masks which you’re really not supposed to do. They should be discarded after every patient,” Rhoads said. “But we’re not able to do that because of our limited resources.”

Aultman had 14 confirmed cases across all its campuses, but not all those are inpatient. “They could have been tested at out drive thru when that was happening and then went home to self-quarantine, so we don’t know that all the patients were in hospitalization.”

Cleveland Clinic Akron General Hospital

Nathan Kindel is a registered nurse in the Emergency Department at Cleveland Clinic Akron General Hospital. He said the emergency room there, like that of Aultman Hospital, is seeing significantly fewer people coming through the door.

“Which is sort of to be expected, because people might associate the hospital with the virus itself and be afraid that, if they come for whatever it may be, they are risking infection.” Kindel said that is a valid concern. He said people are coming to the emergency room who probably don’t need to be there, but that’s discouraging people with chronic conditions who know they should go to the emergency room, but are avoiding it because of the risk of infection.

On his first day at Akron General Kindel cared for a coronavirus patient. “This was early in the pandemic and they ended up calling me two days later to say, ‘hey this guy tested positive,’” Kindel said. “That was the last time they actually did that because after that there were just enough cases that it wasn’t feasible for them to call every single person on the team that was in that room.”

Kindel said between one-fourth and one-third of Akron General patients are coming in with at least one symptom associated with coronavirus, but that doesn’t always mean a patient is positive. “It might be just abdominal pain and fever, which could mean so many different things, but because those are two symptoms that could be associated with coronavirus we have to place them in isolation for caution and act as though they have the virus,” Kindel said.

Unlike Aultman, however, Kindel said Akron General does not seem to have the same supply shortages other hospitals are seeing. He said nurses there have not needed to reuse surgical masks.

Although he does not perform the procedure himself, Kindel thinks Akron General has limited intubation components. “Patients who come in with respiratory distress may end up needing to be intubated so we can control their breathing and make sure they are oxygenating and keeping out excessive carbon dioxide,” Kindel said. “The physicians I work with are a little more limited in their options for how they intubate somebody as a result.”

Kindel graduated from Kent State’s nursing program in December, so he does not have homework to worry about. But entering a new field in such uncertain times presents its own problems.

“The interesting duality that comes with starting nursing in the middle of a pandemic is that there’s this atmosphere of seriousness that’s been around,” Kindel said. “There have been many ways that we’ve prepared for a spike in the number of patients.” But he said some preparations were not utilized. The hospital erected a large tent in the parking lot outside the emergency room. “We never ended up using that tent,” Kindel said. “They actually took it down last time I worked last week.”

Akron General recently began providing nurses with scrubs. Kindel thinks that should be the standard. “I think it’s kind of crazy that we’re expected to buy our own scrubs, but the thing that comes with that is being able to choose what kind of scrubs we get because some of them are kind of sketchy,” Kindel said. “Not sketchy as in they’re falling apart, they’ll just have one pocket and – I don’t know how many nurses you know, but you need more than one pocket, man. I’ve got a lot of shit to carry.”