Ari Dalal, MD, Hospitalist

Our regional health care teams are an example to us all, honestly. I mean, the word hero in this context has been used for three years. But they embody that and I have no hesitation using that phrase for them. I have talked to them – many of them dozens, hundreds of times – and I could sense the hesitation and the unease in their voice.

Our regional health care teams did way more for us than we did for them.

Ari Dalal, MD

It’s not easy to overcome that self doubt and there’s some vulnerability there, to be able to discuss a super complex patient with a different physician (Medical Officer of the Day) who’s not there in person.

Even as we are coming out of COVID in our region, we continue to struggle with adequate staffing of nurses, respiratory therapists, and ultrasound techs – those allied health professionals. And because of that, we are still fairly restricted in how many patients we can take on a daily basis. We have the physical beds in this hospital – which was not the case in the maximum surge – but not all the trained staff to be able to take care of these patients.

You hear about how bad things are, and if you’re a layperson, outside of healthcare, this becomes an abstract concept. It’s like a war in a far off land, that you’re not actually fighting and no one in your family is fighting either. So it’s one thing to say that it’s bad, but do you actually know what “bad” is? Even many of our physicians who had been seeing hundreds of COVID patients for a year and a half – little did they know how different it is to practice in a resource-constrained environment in a rural setting.

That was personally informative for me and similarly, for other physicians who did this work after me. It shed some new light on what it is to deliver rural health care in these kinds of circumstances. Consequently, it’s led me to be more empathetic with people who are in that situation and walk that extra mile to help out, when possible, in any way we can.