Normally, Brooks Rizzo finds herself indoors looking over patients as a Family Nurse Practitioner at North Sunflower Medical Center.
But all of that changed back in March. Rizzo got some different marching orders to help take care of the community. She’s been in charge of the COVID-19 Screening Tent at Sunflower Clinic. Armed with technology and a faithful crew, she’s been helping screen hundreds of patients in the battle against the coronavirus.
“I thought it was best to put a screening tent outside on the front lines,” Rizzo said. “Those that qualified for testing, we tested.”
Recently named as the Clinic Director, Rizzo and her staff screen patients and then get them to a medical provider in the clinic if the patient requested some type of treatment or just simply wanted to be seen by a doctor.
The process sounds easy but has a lot of moving parts. With a crew ranging from five to ten employees, including a traffic director, provider, registered nurse and lab person, Rizzo and her team undertook the job with gusto.
“It was a trial and error. We had to figure out the setup. We had a tent wide enough for a vehicle to drive under. We also had several tables set up and the IT department put our electronic equipment out there, so we’d have access to medical records,” Rizzo said. “I came up with a protocol that was approved by the Mississippi State Board of Nursing. It started there.”
Rizzo had to encompass several agencies and their requirements to make the screening tent a smooth endeavor that covered it all. The constantly changing jigsaw puzzle of protocols and requirements was a hard target to hit, but she and her staff zeroed in on the bullseye.
“The protocol was constantly changing and I was going on the CDC website for their requirements,” she said. “The symptoms for foreign patients were changing, and the Mississippi State Department of Health guidelines changed a little bit too.”
She had the tent up and running by March 24 and averages close to 80 patients each day. The site is open seven days a week, 16 hours a day.
“If they didn’t show symptoms, we would educate them and send them home and tell them what to watch for if anything changed,” she said. “If anything did, we would screen them again. Most persons that were positive were already symptomatic. There’s no cure so you have to treat them symptomatically and if they were well enough, send them home. If they weren’t well enough and their oxygen levels were low, we sent them to the emergency room. Sometimes they were kept for observation or admitted.”
That’s all find and dandy on less windy and more sunny days but when Mother Nature reared her ugly head with high winds and rain, the screening tent took on another mobile location.
“The weather did not cooperate. If the wind wasn’t blowing too hard and it wasn’t lightning, we put on our rain jackets and take an umbrella and do what we had to do,” Rizzo said. “If there were 30-mile-per-hour winds and lightning, we had to take the electronics in and we would move our screening table in the front door.”
Rizzo and her staff will be on the front lines screening patients and testing until further notice.
“We’re just following the State Health Department guidelines and they state if the patient is symptomatic, they want them to test negative before they can go inside and see their regular provider,” she said. “We’re hanging on those guidelines until they change.”
With a dedicated staff of doctors, nurses and administration staff, the COVID-19 Screening Tent at the Sunflower Clinic continues to help patients fight the virus outbreak that continues to threaten folks across the Delta and beyond.
