Our personal and professional lives were changed overnight with the new virus, and these past two months have been the busiest and most challenging of my career. COVID19 threatened to severely decrease our blood supply, and our residents assisted with conservation efforts that ensured every patient had the life-saving blood component needed during this crisis. We put in place a real time blood management program at UL/JH, with Khaled and Tiffani initially screening every unit that left the blood bank - and it didn't stop there!
We rewrote new transfusion guidelines for the entire UL Health system (thank you Youseff, Merryl, Khalda, Dr. Fedda), and put policies and procedures in place for a convalescent COVID plasma program at UL and JH which has helped to save lives (Khalda, Merryl). In the cracks of our days (and nights...) we revamped the BB resident rotations (Merryl, Khalda -more to come!), developed a pdf document that allows residents to easily obtain supplemental visuals to complement their BB reading (that was Khalda!), rewrote the transfusion reaction policy (Merry) and learned the meaning of "team" while using TEAMS. We had residents on call taking more
challenging
calls than usual (somehow they always awaken Hiba and Terri in the middle of the night...). Oh, and we wrote 2 abstracts!
These positive changes could not have happened without the hard work of our residents, all of whom stepped up and worked as junior faculty on the Transfusion Service assisting Dr. Fedda and me during some very challenging times. With all of my years of experience, I could not have handled the volume of the issues that came to us and solved them in an expedited fashion without the assistance of our residents. I know that all of our residents did an outstanding job under the pressure of the new virus, and I wanted to take this opportunity to say thank you to everyone!
