If you have been a patient at the hospital lately to get blood drawn, get emergency care, or attend an appointment and you came in wearing a cloth mask, you would have
First Watch First Responders: Loc Culp
When Culp, nurse manager of the Medical Intensive Care Unit, saw her first COVID-19 patients, she implemented clinical changes while keeping up with the unrelenting stream of patients admitted into the MICU. Throughout the pandemic, her department has cared for the sickest COVID-19 patients while ensuring the unit was staffed properly and safely.
To incorporate these measures, Culp helped change the MICU department into high-risk and low-risk zones. As a wife and mother of three children, Loc spent long hours at the MICU overseeing the health and well-being of critically ill patients, as well as her 110-member staff.
COVID-19 has reconfigured life for the past year and has given new meaning to space, distance and boundaries â necessary adjustments to stop or slow the spread of the virus.
For Danielle Tapia, 29, a registered nurse at University Hospital, the boundaries define the structure of her job. While navigating them, she cares for COVID-19 patients on the progressive care unit (PCU), people who do not require the nearly constant attention of the ICU but for whom the disease is serious enough to require an extended stay at the hospital.
â(The progressive care unit) is kind of that middle ground,â she said. âAnd thatâs why I love it. It is a unit where you get to learn so much.â