‘I Didn’t Do a Good Enough Job Anticipating Demand.’ What It’s Like Working a Drive-Thru COVID-19 Testing Center

Dr. Zeyad Baker thought he was pretty proactive and thorough in thinking through how his team of doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners, physician assistants and medical assistants could address the surging number of cases of COVID-19 cases in New York. The president and CEO of ProHEALTH, a group of 1,000 independent clinicians, took the doctors and nurses who were no longer seeing patients for non-essential visits, and reassigned them to evaluate people coming in with COVID-19 symptoms. He turned the driveways of a few of the ProHEALTH centers into drive-thru COVID-19 testing centers, and worked with doctors and nurses to adapt bedside manner into car-side manner. He figured the five-person teams he trained could handle about 40 to 50 patients driving up a day. On the first day the drive thru opened, on March 19, 167 patients showed up. The next day, there were 212. “I should have thought it through better,” says Baker. “I didn’t fully anticipate the pent up demand.” As drive-thru testing centers pop up across the U.S., in parking lots at hospitals, parks, colleges and stadiums, it’s not just the demand but concerns about supplies that are alarming health authorities. At Banner Health System’s four sites in Arizona, the limiting factor isn’t the staff, but the number of testing kits that are available. “We are testing as fast as the state and counties give us tests,” says Donna Furlong, a registered nurse and clinica...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 Source Type: news