Thousands of employees at Massachusetts hospitals are taking on new roles to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to The Boston Globe.
Massachusetts General Hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Tufts Medical Center, all in Boston, have redeployed workers, as has Worcester-based UMass Memorial Medical Center.
The deployments, over the course of a few weeks, include Tufts nurses who usually work in operating rooms swabbing patients to check for COVID-19; administrators at Beth Israel Deaconess staffing call centers; and physicians at UMass Memorial Medical Center who normally see patients in a clinic working in a field hospital, the Globe reported.
Massachusetts is one of the states hardest hit by the pandemic. On April 21, there were 39,643 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the state.
The public health crisis has left some areas of hospitals with fewer patients than there are in their intensive care units and emergency rooms, and hospitals have canceled elective surgeries and nonurgent appointments, according to the newspaper. This has presented new work opportunities for technologists, physical therapists, nurses, physicians and other healthcare workers.
Massachusetts General has moved more than 2,100 employees, while 1,100 employees are on Beth Israel Deaconess' redeployment list, according to the Globe. Six hundred fifty Beth Israel Deaconess employees have new assignments. At Tufts, about 250 clinicians and other staff have been reassigned, and at UMass Memorial, many physicians who work in ambulatory clinics have taken on new roles.
Read the full report here.
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