Hartford Business Journal

www.HartfordBusiness.com • November 16, 2020 • Hartford Business Journal HCH 5 HEALTH CARE HEROES 2020 HONOREE CATEGORY: HEALTHCARE STAFF Sarah Kenyon Operations Manager Respiratory Care Yale New Haven Hospital S arah Kenyon is the operations manager for the department of respiratory care at Yale New Haven Hospital. She organized the inventory of avail- able mechanical ventilators locally at Yale New Haven Hospital and across the Yale New Haven Health system, ensuring that each delivery network had the appropriate equipment and supplies for staff to care for patients. While there was an outpouring of support and donations for ventila- tors, Kenyon was asked to evaluate the effectiveness of the equipment being offered. The ventilators were an important factor, but there was also a great need for other supplies used to provide appropriate care and main- tain safety for healthcare providers. Many therapies provided by a respi- ratory care practitioner are consid- ered aerosol-generating procedures. These therapies and the equip- ment used needed to be modified to provide patients with the care they needed while also protecting staff. Kenyon and her team implement- ed respiratory care and personal protective equipment guidelines for the care of COVID-19 patients. While the volume of COVID-19 pa- tients continued to increase, Kenyon and her team provided mechanical ventilation support to 150 patients. Kenyon has been a registered respiratory therapist for 17 years and currently manages approxi- mately 150 therapists across two campuses. HONOREE CATEGORY: HEALTHCARE STAFF Sara Newman Yale New Haven Hospital Clinical Program Director Medicine C linical Program Director Sara Newman managed the medi- cal ICU at Yale New Haven Hospital during the COVID crisis in the spring. She essentially created a mini hospital within a hospital by expanding her 56-bed ICU to a 112- bed ICU spanning four floors. This required at least 50 ICU trained nurses, plus ancillary staff, every shift, every day. Newman created her own crisis patient care model in order to safely provide care for the critically ill COVID patients. Staffing models such as tripling pa- tient assignments with teams of nurs- es consisted of non-ICU trained nurses supporting ICU nurses. She helped create teams to provide specialized care such as the "prone team," which worked with nurses and respiratory therapists to place patients in a prone position to improve their ventilation. She also supported experimental procedures such as splitting one ventilator between two patients to be prepared in the event of ventilator shortages. She developed and support- ed a personal protective equipment team that provided appropriate PPE to all staff at the start of each shift and managed PPE supplies and recycling. She supported and communicated changes in practice that were evolv- ing almost daily as scientific knowl- edge was gained about COVID. Newman worked tirelessly to sup- port her staff — who were fright- ened and overwhelmed — to ensure they had everything they needed and provide reassurance. HONOREE CATEGORY: HEALTHCARE STAFF Michael Wolpensinger Executive Director, Support Services Greenwich Hospital M ichael Wolpensinger's abil- ity to mobilize his team helped to physically trans- form Greenwich Hospital from a 206-bed hospital to a 277-bed facility that was fully equipped to safely care for COVID-19 patients while provid- ing essential care to patients who did not have the disease. When news broke in March of the COVID-19 outbreak, Wolpensinger and his team of carpenters, electri- cians and power plant engineers helped establish a drive-up speci- men-collection center. As the number of COVID-19 pa- tients skyrocketed, Wolpensinger's team expanded overall capacity by 71 beds to care for patients who did not have the coronavirus in sepa- rate quarters. Clinical spaces were reconfigured into medical units and a fully equipped tent was erected outside the emergen- cy department to triage patients. Expanding the 11-bed intensive care unit to 30 beds posed multiple challenges. ICU rooms have glass doors, enabling staff to easily visual- ize patients. The rooms being converted to ICU rooms had solid wooden doors, requiring staff to risk exposure when entering to check on patients. To resolve this issue, staff inserted Plexiglas panels in the doors to increase visualization of patients, thereby protecting staff and preserv- ing PPE. HONOREE CATEGORY: COMMUNITY SERVICE — ADVOCACY/POLICY Sarah S. Lewis Vice President, Health Equity, Diversity & Inclusion Hartford HealthCare C OVID-19 shed a long overdue and bright light on historic and systemic inequities in the healthcare of minority populations. If you are Black in Connecticut and get COVID-19, you are more than twice as likely to die and five times more likely to be hospitalized. As vice president of health equity, diversion and inclusion at Hartford HealthCare, Sarah Lewis examines such numbers and explores how to break the cycle of barriers to equitable health care, and be proactive when a COVID-19 vaccine becomes available. Lewis has been instrumental in building Hartford HealthCare's testing capacity in underserved communities, strengthening relationships with community partners, local health districts and faith-based organizations to single- handedly address racial disparities among the Black population. Lewis is helping Hartford Health- Care lead the way through her re- search, identifying tools and practices to communicate important informa- tion to the underserved population. Through her efforts, Hartford HealthCare is actively providing test- ing and awareness initiatives in those specific communities. To date, Hartford HealthCare has performed tens of thousands of tests, and brought mobile testing to Black communities and faith-based organizations where hundreds of residents lined up — who otherwise would likely not get tested.

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