We'll Deal With That Later.

Abstract

We'll Deal With That Later Lauren T. Southerland, Jennifer A. Frey, and Russell Williams The office was empty and all the plants were dead. And while it is not atypical to find plants struggling for life in my personal office, it is not normal to find them in everyone's offices. It was mid-April and we had been in quarantine for COVID-19 and working from home for over a month. Initially, I had been better about nipping into my office to get supplies and things I needed, but once I had permission to take my work desktop home, my bedroom became my primary research space. I hadn't realized until I walked back in that day in April that four weeks had passed of doing all our work from home and no one had been in to water the plants. Even the cactus was drooping and brown. My research team and I had been working on starting up an interventional study to try to reduce COVID-19 infections in healthcare workers, and we were meeting in person to put the final pieces in place. My research manager Jennifer Frey and I needed to process map every element of the study, from where we would meet with potential participants to where we would draw samples and swab nasal passages. Hopefully clinical research would be easier to resurrect than the wilted cacti and dried-up spider plants. On a whim I decided to take every plant I could find home with me to see what could be saved. For everyone in the world the pandemic has been difficult. For an emergency medicine physician who also does clinical research and just took on the leadership role of Director of Clinical Research for the Department, it was very difficult. Add in navigating remote schooling for 4 kids, including a 3 year old boy who is part-tornado, and work challenges were now work-life tournaments with both sides competing ferociously over every minute of time I had. The kids quickly adapted and developed shrewd attack plans: sneaking into the bedroom office to try to make crazy faces during work Zoom calls or nabbing my cell phone so I couldn't double-secure login to hospital websites. Even with my amazing husband at home full time, trying to sort through the 7 websites, (which means 21 different logins between the 3 school age kids) and figuring out how to upload things like "paragraph fluency readings" and kindergarten art projects, it was hard. I can't imagine how unmanageable it was for single parents. Who knows if they were learning anything. We'll worry about the gap in their education later. . . . When COVID hit, we had a team of paid undergrad students, clinical research assistants, research coordinators, and managers recruiting and running 11 different studies in the Emergency Department. In late March, all non-critical research was halted and employees were sent to work from home. We scrambled to find encrypted, HIPAA compliant laptops for everyone. We had several studies that required follow up phone calls to participants. The team figured out how to use the hospital operator service to mirror calls so patient participants only saw the hospital number and not their personal cell phones when they called from home. Jen ordered headsets for the team off Amazon. We'll figure out reimbursement later . . . Our studies ranged from the management of septic shock to identifying delirium in older patients to urine microbiomes. All those were halted as being non-critical and we quickly pivoted to starting up several COVID trials. We'll worry about the consequences to our other studies later . . . This was my first interventional drug trial. An interventional drug trial typically takes 12–18 months of work to ensure that all the appropriate regulations, permissions, and operating procedures are in place. We had to condense that down to 4–6 weeks. You could almost hear the echoing screech as the entire research mechanism at this large academic hospital switched gears to the all-COVID setting. The number of committee decisions, permissions, and signed contracts was amazing. It was lots of late nights, early mornings, and learning on the fly. The...