SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - A Utah-based health care organization will send two virus response teams of medical workers to New York hospitals suffering from staffing shortages because of the COVID-19 outbreak.
Intermountain Healthcare announced Saturday that the 50-member teams will be sent for two weeks, The Salt Lake Tribune reported.
The Utah workers will be assigned to New York-Presbyterian Hospital and Northwell Health Inc. in the New York City area beginning early next week.
“We just feel we need to go help,” said physician Dixie Harris, a pulmonary specialist among those departing for New York starting Tuesday.
“It’s an inner calling. When you go to medical school, when you go to nursing school, you feel this need to go where you are needed,” Harris said.
The New York health care providers will try to support Utah as the state faces its own expected surge of coronvavirus patients, likely in the next two months, Intermountain said.
The teams were assembled after hundreds of medical workers and clinicians expressed a desire to help counterparts in other states struggling to treat rising numbers of patients, Intermountain said.
For most people, the coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough that clear up in two to three weeks. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia and death.
“I’m incredibly proud that so many of our caregivers want to help others in need, and we have the capacity right now to share our staff with others in the middle of their COVID-19 surge,” Paul Krakovitz, Intermountain’s chief medical officer for specialty based care, said in a statement.
The prospect of team members getting invaluable experience treating infected people and a desire to serve ill patients outweighed concerns for their personal safety, Krakovitz said.
“They are going out of the sense of duty and out of a sense of real need to give to our communities,” Krakovitz said. “And to me, this is just an incredible moment.”
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