E-Magazine: HOSA Gives Thanks Initiative

HOSA Gives Thanks Initiative: E-Magazine Article 

Reema Chande and Casey Hinshaw, Team 20

This year, the COVID-19 pandemic presented an opportunity for the 2020-2021 Georgia HOSA State Executive Council to reach out to current healthcare professionals to gain insight on how the COVID-19 pandemic had affected their careers and lives. With this in mind, your SEC chose to reach out to various career paths from across the healthcare field. The selected participants were Dr. Carl Chande, a pharmacist; Jeff Hinshaw, an emergency room physician assistant; and Dr. Pushpa Sundareswaran, a children’s dentist. Each of these healthcare professionals currently serve in major COVID-19 affected professions. With their observations and clinical experience, we aspired to provide our Georgia HOSA members with their insight into the current world of healthcare and inspire our members to look to the future as we become the next generation of healthcare professionals!

With an ongoing pandemic and added responsibilities for many healthcare professionals, our goal was to reach out in a way that would be quick and simple for everyone to engage with. Our process began by sending out one brief, yet detailed email blast to a group of local healthcare industry members that the State Executive Council knew personally or were local to where we live. In the process, your State Secretary and President-Elect were able to truly put our communications skills to the test, since there is now more emphasis than ever on being professional via email. By including a concise subject line, formal greeting, enough context, specific parameters, and actionable steps to follow-up, we were able to communicate the purpose of our initiative effectively. Our goal was to tap into a diversity of fields to gain a wider view on how many different parts of the healthcare world reacted and adapted to the constraints of the pandemic. Instead of scheduling time to sit down and interview each individual, which would likely require a greater time commitment on their end, we opted for a more flexible option: having them send-in short form videos to answer the questions we posed. We wanted to know how their jobs, and lives in general, had changed as a result of such a fundamentally transformed environment within medicine. What kinds of restrictions or guidelines did they follow to keep themselves and their patients safe from the risk of infection? Have the demands of their jobs evolved? How do they foresee the future of their career? After watching, editing, and posting their testimonies, the answers to these questions are available in our Georgia HOSA Gives Thanks IGTV Series (@georgiahosa) if you’re interested in watching!

Thanks to these three frontline healthcare professionals, Georgia HOSA has three insightful videos into the current rules and regulations in the healthcare industry today. Emergency medicine PA, Jeff Hinshaw, introduced us to the newfound importance of wearing face masks and their role in providing quality, effective, patient care. Pharmacist Carl Chande informed us of a few ways that his employers have changed his daily work life. Now, in his work environment, patients are required to stand at a greater distance away from counters than previously before the COVID-19 pandemic occurred. In addition, now in place are glass panels to lower and prevent the spread of the disease. Likewise to Mr. Hinshaw, they also have healthcare providers wear face shields with their masks. Our last healthcare professional--Dr. Pushpa Sundareswaran, who is a children’s dentist, has changed the way her dental office sees its patients. Now, patients are offered the option of having an online waiting room, encouraged to social distance and have their temperature taken, and lastly, by ensuring that each healthcare provider has the correct personal protective equipment (PPE). Each healthcare provider has graciously taken the time to share with Georgia HOSA and its future healthcare professionals some ways the healthcare industry has changed to adapt and provide better care for patients. 

More than anything, the videos we received allowed us an aperture into future developments within healthcare. In a post-pandemic world (or at least a world recovering from a pandemic), what does healthcare look like? Perhaps the addition of PPE requirements and new safety standards will become a mainstay in more healthcare institutions, both in the hospital and retail setting, to prevent the spread of infectious diseases. It is possible, even likely, that the emphasis on technology and virtual alternatives to in-person consultations are here to stay, given the convenience and accessibility they provide. As we’ve seen as a result of quarantine and stay-at-home orders around the country, COVID-19 has pushed mental healthcare into the spotlight as a major issue that impacts an individual’s health in all regardsーan emphasis that will change the way health professionals approach patient care in many, if not all, fields. Above all, as we reflect on the perspectives of current healthcare professionals, we gain an insight on how we, as HOSA members and the next generation of health professionals, must be flexible, compassionate, and prepared to approach the changes that are coming our way.