Podcast #5: Mental Health to Technology: What COVID-19 Taught Nurse Jenn

In our fifth podcast Ashley and Kelly from Cortico interview Nurse Jenn about COVID-19, technology currently used in hospitals and how future technology could benefit healthcare workers and patients.

Kelly 0:03
All right. Hi everyone. Welcome to the fifth episode of the podcast. We are Kelly and Ashley from Cortico, and previously we were joined with Dr. Singhal, a principal physician to discuss his success journey using telehealth. But today, instead of telehealth, let’s step back to see what other technologies are used in the healthcare sphere. So today, our guest speaker is Nurse Jenn. She is a nurse from BC and has been working as a nurse for two years.

Ashley 0:35
So thanks for joining us today, Jenn. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Nurse Jenn 0:40
Um, so I’m a nurse. I’ve been an RN, I’ve been working as a nurse for two years. I started 2020, beginning of 2020, worked throughout the pandemic. I worked in the COVID unit for, maybe, six months, and then I started to work in the NICU, which is ICU for newborns for the past 10 months or so. It’s been really great. I love where I am now.

Ashley 1:10
And a little bit about me and Jenn, me and Jenn actually used to work really close together, at a local walk-in clinic in Coquitlam. Good time. So Jenn, can you tell us what inspired you to become a nurse?

Nurse Jenn 1:26
I always knew, since I was like, four years old that I wanted to work with babies. I don’t know what it is about babies that I love so much, but I’ve wanted to work with babies since I was a baby, basically. And in grade 10. We were in planning and then the teacher was talking about how a nurse- the nurses when he was having his first baby, helped him and his wife so much through the birthing experience more than- not more than the doctor, but was more present than the doctors were. And so I was like wow, that’s exactly what I want to do. So, I went into nursing straight out of high school, and I got into the program and it took basically almost seven years to finish because of the waitlist, but once I got in, I tried to apply to work in either maternity or with newborns, and eventually I was able to get in.

Kelly 2:24
Wow, thanks for sharing that. It seems like you kind of knew straight off the bat that you wanted to become a nurse, but it seems like after you graduated COVID kind of hit right after that. How has that experience been working as a nurse in the COVID setting?

Nurse Jenn 2:39
When I first started, I actually didn’t get any shifts, I was casual. There were no call outs for me. I didn’t work for one month because they were trying to minimize the numbers or some- whatever it was, I wasn’t able to get shifts. After that I started working in the COVID unit on and off COVID and medicine. Nursing, honestly, every single shift you have is a learning experience. You really build your knowledge each shift that you have because you’re building your experience. So when I started working in COVID, it was actually less stressful for me than the regular medicine Unit. Because in medicine there’s so many different sicknesses, so many different things that you will experience than with COVID it’s one illness, so you can kind of focus your attention on that one thing. Although with nursing, you can’t obviously just look at the one illness you have to look at the bigger picture. So it was actually not too bad. It was just kind of a lot of paranoia, thinking that I’m going to bring home something, but I was worried about bringing home anything in the hospital.

Ashley 3:46
Jenn, did you notice the increased numbers of patients that you were seeing during COVID, opposed to before COVID? Because when I look back, when you left the clinic, and started working at the hospital, we were trying to- we were right into COVID, and I know you probably saw a larger amount of patients than a normal nurse, during normal times. Was there an increased number of patients who started to see in the COVID section?

Nurse Jenn 4:17
Actually, at our hospital, there weren’t that many COVID patients. There wasn’t actually. Maybe there was about 10, sometimes 3, sometimes 2, like it wasn’t a lot, but they had to stay in one unit, which means that all the patients that would normally be in that medicine unit, got moved to a different unit. So then, other units would be full and there would be a shortage of nurses, which is why there was a heavier patient load. It wasn’t actually really because there was more patients that I found, it was because there weren’t enough nurses and because most of the patients had been moved into other places in the hospital.

Ashley 4:56
Okay, and say, a couple months go by, still COVID, and now the numbers are increasing. What was your workload like?

Nurse Jenn 5:03
When I worked in COVID? We had a maximum of three patients to conserve infection control. For infection control purposes, we had three patients. That was supposed to be our workload. There were times when, either we would be short a nurse, or we just had a sudden influx of patients that we would have more than three, but it was considered a safety hazard because that means more exposures to different people. But, in the medicine unit we had, 4 patients, 5, sometimes 6 patients at a time.

Ashley 5:37
Wow. What kind of technology was implemented? Now, I know in a hospital setting, and in a clinic, clinical setting, it is pretty different. What kind of technology was implemented to support you in any way? So you can see your patient, and follow up with your patients? Like telehealth, or?

Nurse Jenn 5:59
There was Cerner, which is, instead of paper trading, you do computer charting, which makes it 100 times easier because with paper charting, if you have to go back and forth in the room, you’re having to touch papers, and get the germs off from your hands onto the paper, you can’t clean that. With the computer system, we each have our own designated WoWs they’re called, which is workstation on wheels. So we cleaned it halfway through the day with the Caviwipes, always had to clean it thoroughly before we started using it. And then, we also had iPads that we allowed the patients to use while they would be in the hospital, if they were COVID positive.

Ashley 6:43
Let’s just say, if you were seeing a patient, and then you couldn’t see a lot of patients all at once. Did you use any virtual health patient engagement systems? Just hearing from what you just said with your workload, was there any sort of virtual health technology that you used seeing your patients? Did you see your patients virtually, maybe from home when you’re doing notes, or how did you follow up with your patients and then the number of patients you started seeing? How did you follow up with your patients?

Nurse Jenn 7:11
Because I’m working bedsides, everything that I needed to do, I would have to go inside the rooms. I know that sometimes people would use the phones to talk to their patients, so that they don’t have to go back and forth, but not all the patients are with it enough to be able to use their phones. They just might not be able to do that, so it wasn’t realistic. So we usually had to go into the rooms, and do whatever we needed to do, whatever care was.

Ashley 7:37
One more question on that note, do you think something could have been implemented where you could have followed up with your patients a lot better and more accurately? Do you think telehealth would have played a more important role during these difficult times when you were seeing your patients? Is there something that you would have wanted to see that you didn’t see during these challenging times?

Nurse Jenn 7:58
Not really, well, as a nurse, it’s hard because we have to give physical care. We cannot do anything virtually, except for if we have a question that we need to ask the patients, instead of going into the rooms, maybe that would be helpful. But otherwise, bathing the patient, changing the patient, mobilizing the patient, we have to go into the room so there’s really nothing that they could do about that, I don’t think. It was more of a PPE issue, making sure that we’re protected. That’s really the main thing, which we did have a shortage of gowns at many points, we had a shortage of masks sometimes, shortage of hand sanitizer sometimes, but, it wasn’t really that we didn’t have any. It was like we had to ration our PPE a lot.

Ashley 8:50
Wow.

Kelly 8:51
Another question I had was, I understand that hospitals have booking clerks, in terms of booking appointments for patients to see a health care provider, but what are the other admin work that nurses do in a hospital setting?

Nurse Jenn 9:05
We actually do a lot. In medicine units, bedside units, where patients are admitted, the inpatient units, we have a unit clerk. When we were doing paper charting, they would do a lot of work, and especially the units that I work in now, where it’s maternity. They have to triage patients, they have to input patients into the systems, transfer patients from bedside to OR, and all that stuff. They did a lot of it. Once we went through our Cerner, the computerized systems, we did a lot of the transferring patients from one unit to another through the system, accessing changes in doctor’s orders, which is normal, changes in lab results. Administration was mostly for when patients would be transferred or admitted to the unit. We would have to input a lot of that information ourselves before a lot of the unit clerks could do.

Ashley 10:09
That’s a lot of work. A lot of admin work as well on top of seeing patients.

Nurse Jenn 10:13
It is, yeah, it is.

Ashley 10:15
Jenn, during these challenging times I understand the large amount of burnouts for frontline workers. How have you been managing these challenging times with mental health?

Nurse Jenn 10:27
During the COVID time, that was the hardest because, like I said, it was kind of like a cycle. We would get COVID patients, patients would be moved, we would have to move the entire unit from one side to another, and we would be short nurses. And we’d be short nurses because people were scared of getting COVID, so we get a lot of sick calls, which would be suddenly be down one nurse. And then, we have to take on more patients than we normally would, like one nurse to 5 patients, one nurse to 6 patients. A lot of those patients, especially my hospital, had drug use problems and mental health problems, which is exhausting. Absolutely mentally draining when you work so often with people who have mental health problems. It’s expected in nursing, but definitely there was a huge spike in violence, and verbal violence, and verbal abuse to nurses. So, people call in sick. I’ve called in sick twice a month for sure. But that was basically once every set because I couldn’t handle it. Mentally, having to go there for basically 40 hours in 4 days. It’s too much work, it’s too mentally exhausting.

Ashley 11:43
Yeah, I can only imagine, Jenn, just to kind of wrap up the podcast. Again, I wanted to thank you so much for joining us today. My last question to you is because you worked in a clinical setting. You are currently in a hospital right now. How would you like to see technology support you and other nurses in the future?

Nurse Jenn 12:02
That would be more for the unit that I’m working in now with babies. There are small things that we have that would help us with our workload a lot. For example, we have to make our own milk, or prepare our own milk for the babies. At our hospital, we don’t have a scanning system so that we can double check to make sure that this is the correct milk, correct mom, whatever. So, we have to do everything by hand, we have to double check by hand, and that leads to probably more errors. So, I find that the more technology there is, especially in clinical settings, when you’re giving medications and things like that, you have to make sure it’s the correct medication, correct person you’re giving it to. And the more you have to do that by hand, I feel like the more chance there is for human error. So if there’s a way to have a system that is able to cross check these things, I don’t know why would we not want that. I think that sometimes people are stuck in the old school way of doing things.

Ashley 13:03
I completely agree with you. Why do you think that is? Why do you think that technology wise in healthcare? Why do you think it’s so behind? Why do you think people are still stuck in using the same methods 20, 30, years ago when we finally have secure, solid technology in healthcare that can actually advance patient care? Why do you think it’s so far behind and why can’t people keep up with it?

Nurse Jenn 13:27
I think people are very scared of change.

Ashley 13:30
Yeah.

Nurse Jenn 13:30
I think that’s the main thing because even when we started getting Cerner, people were like, I don’t want to use a computer, like, I’m going to be so lost. But in reality, it’s so much easier. You have all your tasks displayed on the computer. You don’t have to memorize things. You have your medication references right there. You don’t have to pull out, find a book and look through pages. You have the doctor’s orders clearly typed out. You don’t have to understand somebody’s penmanship. If we went backwards, it wouldn’t make sense, right? So I think that people are afraid of change. Because there’s still some hospitals that don’t use computers.

Ashley 14:06
EMR, yeah.

Nurse Jenn 14:06
Right? I think that if people are less afraid of letting go of our traditional ways, and more open to trying new ways, that will only help us. We can do that. We can definitely try, and then we always have our traditional ways to lean back on in case the system fails.

Ashley 14:25
Exactly. That’s really good to know.

Kelly 14:27
One last thing I want to comment is that, a machine that can measure, can print a sticker with a scan on and you know things like that. That exists, we see that everywhere in grocery stores. You know, when they measure the food, you get a sticker and it’s exact. So, the technology is there, but, like you said it seems like healthcare is a little bit hesitant in adopting these technologies. So, I’m really glad that we’re able to hear that from a frontline worker, and we hope to see that in the future. Thank you Nurse Jenn, once again for joining us today, and I’ll see everyone else in the next podcast. Thanks everyone.

Ashley 15:02
Thanks Jenn.

Nurse Jenn 15:02
Thank you.