In the News

Many of the pandemic’s effects are widely known — the lives lost, the businesses that have shut their doors, the families that are going hungry, the women who are being forced out of the job market, and the disproportionate impacts of all of this on lower-income families and communities of color.  By Diana Cutts, MD, the Chief of Pediatrics at Hennepin County Medical Center and Megan Sandel, MD, MPH, an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the Boston University Schools of Medicine and Public Health. Drs. Cutts and Sandel are Co-Lead Principal Investigators at Children’s HealthWatch headquartered at Boston Medical Center, a nonpartisan network of pediatricians, public health researchers, and children’s health and policy experts.

“We feel strongly that to change the trajectory of our community, we need to change how healthcare is delivered from the ground up,” Hennepin Healthcare CEO Jennifer DeCubellis said in a statement.

Dr. Sederstrom has a background in program development and speaks nationally on topics including racism, racial disparities, bias, end-of-life care and other aspects of diversity and ethics.

“It’s the same swab that we use for the COVID-19 test that we use for influenza, so it’s very easy for us to test for both,” explained Hennepin Healthcare Urgent Care nurse Lisa Gallick.

So just how bad is it? Earlier this month, two members of a state panel of experts organized to give guidelines to ensure people of color aren’t left behind accused the Department of Health of ignoring their recommendations and doing its business in the dark.

“There has been no transparency with the advisory group or the public [as] to how decisions are being made on the methods of vaccine allocation,” Nathan Chomilo, a pediatrician with Park Nicollet, and Nneka Sederstrom, chief health equity officer for Hennepin Healthcare, wrote in a letter to Malcolm. “Right now speed is winning and equity is losing.”

The exhibit also features artifacts from the turn of the 20th century, such as equipment and uniforms. The star artifact is the kidney transporter used during the first kidney transplant in the Midwest in 1963. The operation was performed at Minneapolis General Hospital — now Hennepin County Medical Center.

In 2016, the directors of Minnesota’s six ECMO centers created a consortium to help with pandemic and emergency operations, said Dr. Matthew Prekker, a pulmonologist and critical care specialist at Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis. The consortium established uniform eligibility guidelines to make sure all critically sick patients get a fair chance at the therapy.

If half the state’s medical centers reach capacity, it triggers an emergency conference call between the ECMO center directors, who steer patients to open beds. “We are well organized,” said Prekker. “We don’t work in silos.”

What mark will the pandemic leave on the generation growing up right now?   MPR, 2-17-2021