‘To be hit all at once with so much support, it really is keeping the staff going’
By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff
SOMERS POINT – Shore Medical Center is feeling the love from the communities it serves.
Some days it comes in the form of some coffee and bagels, other days in boxes of pizza or trays of ziti. It could be some cookies or granola bars or energy drinks.
For Easter it was chocolate bunnies and chocolate eggs.
There also is a different kind of love, helping provide personal protective equipment, professional and handmade, gloves, gowns, surgical masks and scrub caps. Even those little plastic tabs that connect the straps from face masks on the back of staff members’ heads so the back of their ears don’t get sore from wearing maks all day long.
On occasion there are other things, a basket of pampering gifts for the staff, hand lotion and those microwaveable lavender-scented pillows to relieve tension during an incredibly tense time at the hospital and in the communities.
It is a show of love and support for the people having to work during the COVID-19 pandemic that has infected some 60,000 residents of New Jersey and led to the death of more than 2,000. Although the cases are fewer here than in north Jersey, Atlantic and Cape May counties have not been spared from infections and deaths and countless people who are feeling the stress from closed schools and businesses and stay-at-home orders.
“We’ve had food, every kind of food you could imagine from every place local you can imagine and not so local,” said Tami Kitchen, who works in the patient experience department with Kathleen Schallus. “It’s just crazy.”
“Our community is just great anyway,” Kitchen said. “It’s great all the time, but now, to be hit all at once with so much support, it really is keeping the staff going.”
The staff is stressed, she acknowledged, because along with working in a hospital during a pandemic, they still have to worry about their own families, their kids, their parents. “They’re struggling with all that. And they’re busy taking care of their patients, which is different when they can’t have their loved ones with them. Patients are lonely. Patients do better when they have their loved ones around. The staff is struggling with twice as many phone calls because they’re trying to keep their families updated. And they’re gowning and masking and gloving and worrying about the coronavirus.”
Kitchen said she has worked at other places, but Shore Medical Center stands out.
“We’re taking care of our neighbors and friends and family,” she said.
In turn, when they see the donations, they know they are being taken care of.
“The food and all is great (and) the fact that everyone is donating money and supplies and gowns and gloves, that makes it all the more emotional,” she said. “It shows they want to protect our staff.”
Early on during the COVID-19 crisis, the donations were a bit overwhelming because people were just showing up in the lobby with what they wanted to give, helping in their own personal way. Since then, the hospital has tried to streamline the process to make sure the donations get to the right places and to protect the people who are donating.
If people call ahead, a staff member will come out to their vehicle – properly protected – and pick up the donation so the donors don’t have to get out of the car or enter the hospital.
Those who would like to donate to show their support for Shore Medical Center, can call the patient experience department at (609) 653-3882. If no one answers, leave a message and Kitchen or Schallus will return the call.
“People are calling us, they don’t know what to do,” Kitchen said, noting there are ways to show support that don’t involve a donation.
“Have your kids draw us some artwork. We hang the artwork up. Send me a note and I’ll put in on our message,” she said. “It doesn’t have to do anything big and fancy. Just the thought, that’s just a beautiful thing (for us) to see.”
Kitchen noted that she and a coworker, an infectious disease nurse, are the ones who have to call people with their COVID-19 test results. She said she always get a good reaction because she calls all the people who test negative, and her colleague, who tells people they tested positive, also gets a good reaction.
That’s because when she calls, Kitchen said, the people she talks to always want to point out how someone on the Shore staff did something nice for them and how they liked their experience at the hospital. Her coworker told her the same thing: “The patients are so appreciative. They’re telling me all these good things even when I’m telling them they’re positive (for COVID-19). Even the ones who are sick have had good things to say.”