Thomas Breen photos
Firefighters cheer on YNHH healthcare providers Thursday morning.
With lights flashing and sirens blaring, fire engines from throughout the region lined up along Howard Avenue for a celebratory procession in honor of Yale New Haven Hospital healthcare workers at the front lines of the city’s Covid-19 crisis.
That rally and expression of first responder solidarity and gratitude took place Thursday morning at the intersection of Howard Avenue, York Street, and Davenport Avenue, right outside of YNHH’s main hospital campus at 20 York St.
Dozens of firefighters from New Haven, West Haven, North Haven, and other surrounding towns leaned out of the front seats of their engines or stood along the edges of Howard Avenue applauding and cheering for roughly 10 minutes straight.
Across the street, looking out of upperstory windows and spilling out onto the hospital’s driveway and adjacent sidewalks, dozens more YNHH nurses and doctors and other healthcare workers clad in sky blue-scrubs waved and cheered back, holding their phones high as they video recorded the thanks coming their way.
“Six feet! Six feet! Spread it out! Six feet!” city Fire Chief John Alston (pictured) cautioned through a handheld megaphone as more and more YNHH staff came outside to check out all of the congratulatory commotion.
“We came here to thank you, but we want you to be safe. Six feet! Six feet!”
“It makes me feel just amazed,” said pediatric nurse Traci Heard (pictured). “I love it. We appreciate it that people appreciate us. We appreciate them, and we wouldn’t change this for the world.”
“It means everything,” said another YNHH staffer (pictured) who said she works in pre-admission screening but has moved over to helping out at the hospital’s daycare during this public health. “These guys are our comrades in arms.”
Ena Williams (pictured), Yale New Haven Health’s chief nursing officer and a senior vice president, said she was “blown away” by the firefighter turnout and willingness to “raise the noise” for healthcare workers treating patients sick with the novel coronavirus.
“My heart is so filled with pride and gratitude for what just happened here,” she said. “To have others really recognize what we’ve been doing our whole lives as something special, I can’t explain what that means.”
Williams said that the local hospital has around 350 Covid-19 patients in beds getting treatment in New Haven right now.
“That has been growing steadily,” she said. She added that she is cautiously optimistic that the rate of coronavirus in-patient increase is slowing down thanks to people following the local and state social distancing mandates. “But this stuff can change at a moment’s notice,” she said.
At this moment in Connecticut’s public health crisis, with the anticipated Covid-related hospitalization peak coming later this month, Williams said YNHH has a sufficient supply of personal protective equipment (PPE), such as gloves, masks, and gowns.
“We’re in really good shape,” she said, thanks to both donations to the hospital and the work of the regional health care system’s supply chain leaders.
“We have what we need, but we always want to be good stewards. We want to be as responsible as we can in regards to how we use PPE.”
She said that the hospital has bolstered a variety of new and existing employee wellness programs to ensure that nurses and other healthcare providers who routinely work 12 hour shifts during this crisis are able to maintain their own mental health.
She said the hospital offers “mindfulness sessions,” a new quiet location where staff can go and decompress, access to telephone hotlines staff can call seven days a week from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. if they need to talk about anything Covid-related, and even new places for healthcare workers to quarantine themselves and sleep if they feel like they cannot go home without putting their own families at risk of contracting the disease.
Williams said that YNHH nurses and doctors have had to adapt how they deliver care and how best to connect patients with their family members at a time when hospital visitations are all but banned in order to mitigate the spread of the disease.
She said she rounded with the hospital’s chief medical officer on Wednesday. They visited a patient who “was about to transition into another life.” That patient’s husband was in another unit of the hospital, also suffering from Covid.
“Our staff was able to FaceTime with the husband, who was still alert,” she said, by using iPads that the hospital has stationed in some patients’ rooms. She said staff were also able to video-conference in a chaplain so that the husband and wife could pray together before the wife passed away.
In another unit, she said, hospital staff were able to use video monitors to connect a teenager suffering from Covid-19 with his mom.
“We’re doing care in a way that we probably have not done it before,” she said.
When asked how New Haveners stuck at home can best help and show support for local healthcare workers, Williams mentioned all of the food donations that local restaurants have made. She said that many people have donated handmade cloth masks, which patients can use or which hospital staff sometimes wear over their own n95 respirators in order to better preserve that PPE.
“I think that wherever you can find the opportunity to create a sense of hope,” she said, “we’ll take whatever you can give us.”