Our Lady of the Lake Health and a university have partnered to create an oral history of health care workers' experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The online collection of interviews that the Baton Rouge, Louisiana-based health system created with departments of Louisiana State University is called "Under Pressure: A Louisiana Hospital's COVID-19 Experience." The project documents the challenges, innovations and resilience of frontline staff during the pandemic.
Made available online about five years after the start of the pandemic, the audio recordings are meant to ensure that the experiences of frontline staff and the lessons they learned are preserved for the public, researchers and future generations, says a press release on the project.
The Under Pressure collection features 13 individual and group interviews with Our Lady of the Lake Health associates who played key roles in responding to the pandemic. The audio recordings are available at ololrmc.com/stories-of-strength.
"The stories captured in this collection are a powerful reminder of what it meant to be a health care worker during the pandemic," Dr. Catherine O'Neal said in the release. "We witnessed extraordinary courage, innovation and humanity." O'Neal is chief academic officer for Our Lady of the Lake Health's parent, Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health System.
Trials and triumphs
Our Lady of the Lake Health partnered on the project with Louisiana State University's Manship School of Mass Communication and LSU Libraries. The featured interviews took place in July and August 2024.
In the recordings, the interviewees talk about how they made decisions in the rapidly evolving crisis; how they adapted to changing guidelines, supply shortages and patient surges; what day-to-day life was like in the hospital; the emotional and psychological toll the crisis took; how team members coped with the stress; and how staff came up with innovations to handle the many challenges they encountered. They also reflect on the lessons learned that could be instructive to future medical personnel and others.
O'Neal said, "Preserving these experiences ensures we never forget those who stood strong when our community needed them most."
Plans call for longer versions of the staff interviews to be available on a Louisiana State University oral histories website in the future.
Baby monitors and glass searches
One staff member who shared her memories of COVID-19 for Under Pressure was Heather Runnels, vice president, patient care services, Our Lady of the Lake St. Elizabeth in Gonzales, Louisiana.
She shared how she and her team had to quickly come up with creative solutions to emerging challenges at the onset of the pandemic. For instance, to reduce the risk of contagion, the team decided to sequester patients with COVID-19 in a particular unit of the hospital and to limit physical contact between those patients and hospital staff. But an issue arose: All the private patient rooms in the unit had windowless doors, so the clinicians could not view the patients. A crunch-time fix involved staff members running out to local stores to purchase baby monitors.
For a longer-term solution, staff members including the facilities team worked with local construction crews to install windows in the private rooms' doors. Runnels remembered how staff scrambled to inventory exactly how much glass was available locally, to ensure they had enough to outfit all the doors.
She said that installing windows in the doors restored at least some of the connection that nurses and patients alike had missed. "From a human interaction part, at least the patients could see us now. … I could only imagine being the patient in that bed feeling tremendously alone" prior to the windows' installation, Runnels said. "We were taking care of them and doing everything we were supposed to do, but we were much more distant than we would have been in a traditional hospital stay.
"Also, as nurses it is fundamentally against what we are taught to not touch and not interact with our patients, so I think it also helped the morale of the nurses to have more line of sight."
She said, "The nurses, through trying to figure out how can I best take care of my patients, were so creative and so innovative, and we were just like, ‘Yeah, let's go, let's try it!'"
Our Lady of the Lake is inviting other staff to contribute to the collection.