Page 44 - RU Robert Wood Johnson Medicine • Summer 2020

Alumni
PROFILES
Laryssa Patti, MD ’13: Containing the Contagion
How are you making sure your students are learning from this experience?
Obviously, we’ve had to make all of our classes online. Normally, we do simulations with mannequins and we’ve adapted to do that online. It’s been a challenge, but we’re trying to deliver the same educational quality remotely as we do in person. We also have residents in the ER. They are working their normal schedules and
Laryssa Patti, MD ’13, assistant professor of emergency medicine, is on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic in two
important ways. As an emergency room physician at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, she treats patients coming in with symptoms of the disease. As the emergency medicine clerkship director at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, she prepares medical students to be tomorrow’s ER doctors. She spoke to Rutgers University Foundation in April about both aspects of her work and how the pandemic has affected each.
carrying the brunt of patient care. They are truly on the front lines.
How did Robert Wood Johnson Medical School prepare you for this kind of crisis?
The training I got was so broad and diverse, and we spent so much time thinking about how to interact with various parts of the community. Having that experience of
Joseph P. Costabile, MD ’86, is a vascular surgeon at Virtua Surgical Group in South Jersey and is affiliated with Cooper University Hospital. Dr. Costabile is a captain in the U.S Navy Reserve and has served for decades with the U.S. Armed Forces.
Within 24 hours of getting a phone call from the commanding officer of my unit, I’m standing on a line at Fort Dix waiting to be processed and moved into buses to transport us to New York City. The response to COVID-19 has the United States Army in the lead in mobilized reserve forces to help New York hospitals, overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients, combat this new enemy of humanity. Experiencing what I have recently experienced, make no mistake: this is a war, and we as nurses and doctors are the primary combatants of the fight.
Some of the nurses and doctors in the reserves are assigned to Woodhull Hospital, an inner-city facility in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. A “safety net”
hospital, it serves an economically depressed and multicultural population. Originally built as a prison, which never opened, and then converted to a hospital, it is obviously not designed for patient care, but the staff have made it work. They are dedicated and hardworking, and they do their best, but the situation is overwhelming: long shifts, nonstop admissions, patients intubated and on ventilators, and inadequate resources. It is a nightmare.
We arrive and are given three days of orientation, the majority of which is related to the EHR, electronic health records. We are broken up into four teams of three to four providers; doctors and nurse practitioners from the Navy Reserve are assigned an extension
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Robert WoodJohnson | MEDICINE
Joseph P. Costabile, MD ’86, Shares Deployment to
JOHN O’BOYLE
COURTESY OF JOSEPH P. COSTABILE, MD ’86