Like many other clinical departments at El Camino Health, Imaging Services works 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and is focused on providing high-quality, personalized services to patients quickly and efficiently.
During the pandemic, clinical staff must wear additional protective equipment as a barrier against COVID-19. Being a patient in a hospital during a pandemic can be a stressful experience for patients, and anxiety can increase even more when patients cannot see the faces of the people who are treating them.
Working behind the scenes, and often right in the middle of the front lines, employees in the Patient Experience Department strive to ensure that all patients and visitors have the very best experience possible whenever they visit El Camino Health.
While El Camino Health's most important mission is to "heal, relieve suffering and advance wellness" of the community and its patients, equally important is ensuring that its employees, especially front-line workers, stay healthy in the fight against COVID-19.
Situated in Silicon Valley, El Camino Health, like any high quality healthcare organization, uses technology and data to improve the care they deliver to patients. Making that data available to a wide range of healthcare professionals is one of the challenges for Robert Henehan, Manager, Information Systems Reporting and Business Intelligence, and his team.
Among one of the first hospitals in the nation to see COVID-19 patients, El Camino Health and the Taft Center for Clinical Research has been among the leaders in COVID-19 clinical trials, working with pharmaceutical companies to find solutions to help manage and cure the deadly pandemic.
El Camino Health administered its first COVID-19 vaccinations to hospital front-line workers and physicians on December 18, and, by the end of the year, more than 1,600 employees and travelers, and close to 400 physicians, have received the first in a series of two vaccinations.
Thorough preparation and the ability to be flexible and agile, when necessary, is helping El Camino Health’s Emergency Department and Critical Care Unit continue to provide high quality care as the number of COVID-19 patients and overall patient volume continued to grow through November and December.
As the Environmental Health and Safety Manager for El Camino Health, preparing for emergencies, large or small, is a routine part of the job for Steve Weirauch.
From the start of the pandemic, El Camino Health treated any patient entering the emergency rooms as a potential patient with COVID-19 who posed a risk of spreading the virus.
The command center at El Camino Health was in operation for an unprecedented 72 days on the Mountain View campus and fully activated within 24 hours of the first patient with COVID-19 arriving in the emergency room.
A quick shift in focus for both the patient care resources and human resources teams was needed during the COVID-19 pandemic in order to address evolving safety challenges requiring fast action.
Readiness, vigilance and all-in when needed are the strongholds and proof points of El Camino Health’s infection prevention commitment when it comes to annual flu outbreaks and especially the most recent coronavirus pandemic.
