Claire Chen, left, and Amanda Hertzler, medical students from Touro University Nevada, wait in a medical screening tent at a temporary homeless shelter overflow facility set up in a Cashman Center parking lot Saturday, March 28, 2020. Officials established the camp to house residents who were displaced when Catholic Charities closed due to coronavirus concerns.
Wednesday, April 1, 2020 | 2 a.m.
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When Amanda Hertzler received a phone call asking her to screen people seeking shelter at the Cashman Center for COVID-19, she didn’t hesitate to jump on the opportunity. In less than an hour, she was dressed in personal protective equipment at the center’s temporary homeless shelter.
The third-year osteopathic medical student at Touro University had been off clinical rotations for weeks now due to the pandemic and was eager to jump back in any way she could.
“I think one of the biggest things I’ve learned is that anything we do in any small way is helping,” Hertzler said. “It’s amazing to see how we can all come together as a society to help protect those who are high-risk.”
Hertzler, like many other medical students throughout the country, initially felt sidelined by her day-to-day, in-person clinical work while future colleagues were on the front lines fighting the virus. As Touro physician assistant student Julie Therien puts it, physician assistant students are still “babies” in the health care industry eager to help, but without the proper credentials or experience to be on the front lines.
Now as COVID-19 cases in the United States continue to grow exponentially, some states are looking to medical school students to help ease the strain off their health care systems, already bursting at the seams. Medical schools in New York and Boston, for example, are offering early graduation to fourth-year students, The New York Times reported.
Medical schools in Southern Nevada are mobilizing students to screen patients for symptoms both on the scene and in call centers to take some of the weight off emergency rooms and doctor’s offices.
Dr. Wolfgang Gilliar, dean of Touro’s College of Osteopathic Medicine, and Dr. Phil Tobin, director of Touro’s School of Physician Assistant Studies, are leading groups of up to 10 students at Cashman who have volunteered to perform screenings for the hundreds of homeless individuals who come to the temporary shelter every night until Friday. The facility at Cashman opened last weekend after Catholic Charities closed its shelter when one of its clients tested positive for COVID-19.
Students take temperatures and ask basic screening questions (if they’re experiencing a cough or have been in contact with someone with COVID-19) and make a clinical decision on whether to let them check in to the facility, or transport them to another center for testing.
“Some of this was really just taking the time to listen to someone’s fears and put them at ease as best we could,” Hertzler said. “This population specifically tends to slip through the cracks, so being able to give them that reassurance is very nice for medical students like us, and we’re all very eager to jump in and help.”
On March 24, the UNLV School of Medicine clinical arm launched coronavirus curbside testing for those who pass telehealth phone screening questions conducted by UNLV medical student volunteers. On the first day, the call center received more than 2,000 phone calls from people worried they might have COVID-19, officials said.
Screening questions include Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines for coronavirus, including fever, cough and shortness of breath.
Maran Shaker, who previously served as a combat medic for the U.S. Army is a third-year medical student at UNLV and hopes to eventually pursue emergency medicine. For Shaker, operating under stress is second nature for him.
“But I think all medical providers are accustomed to that,” he said.
Still, there are certain aspects of the coronavirus that Shaker said are reminiscent of his time serving in the Army.
“The overall social changes like isolation and quarantine and being given a certain set of rules that control your day-to-day life, while for a civilian might be a difficult thing to do, is for me kind of like being in the military,” he said.
Much like the medical student volunteers at Touro, Shaker said most of his job while screening for symptoms at the school’s call center has been keeping people calm and debunking misinformation.
“A lot of the patients have been very isolated,” he said. “It really showed with the elderly population. I had a patient call who was a very elderly gentleman who was afraid to go get tested because he thought he’d be arrested and taken away. People are seeing random things in the media and interpreting it in their own ways.”
For fourth-year UNLV medical student Lennon Zimmerman, volunteering at the call center has been an invaluable educational experience for him in understanding how certain symptoms manifest in people.
“I think it would be really interesting to follow up on some of the people I talked to and see which ones tested positive to see if any of the symptoms correlated more or less with testing positive,” he said, admitting that the screening criteria aren’t perfect.
Responding to a pandemic is something a lot of those in the medical field think about, but rarely imagine they’ll actually have to confront, said Therien, who took a disaster life-training course earlier in the school year.
“Oddly enough, the (lecturers) said we were due to have a virus sometime soon, and they couldn’t have been more right,” she said. “I kind of entertained it in my mind on how I would respond to one … but it’s not something people can prepare for. That’s what makes it so tricky. We don’t know what to expect, so it’s hard to be prepared.”
For Therien, most of her drive to stay strong and continue to do good work where she can comes from her grandfather, who immigrated from Palestine to the United States hoping to study medicine.
“I think one of the things that was in his mind as an immigrant in America is hard work and preparation is all that we have,” she said. “I think that’s something that trickled down to me — that the harder you’re working, the better you’re going to be.”
While happy to help where she can, Hertzler still wishes there was more she could do.
“It’s been hard not being able to see patients when so many other doctors are being worked so hard right now, but the best we can do right now is keep studying and keep preparing for board exams,” she said.
