Connection Conversations - COVID Care Force - Dr. Paul Fuhrmeister

The TCC Connection

Connection Conversations: COVID Care Force Date Recorded: 12/15/2020 Overview: Host Sam Levrault interviews Dr. Paul Fuhrmeister over his experience volunteering with the COVID Care Force and the Navajo Nation. Running time: 18:12 minutes The following transcript has been edited for clarity. Sam Levrault Welcome to the TCC connection. I'm Sam Levrault. I'm the managing editor here at the TCC connection. On this episode, we have special guests, Dr. Paul Fuhrmeister, thank you for joining me today. And on this episode, we'll be talking about your experience as a medical doctor who volunteered on Navajo Nation a couple of times now in New Mexico during the covid 19 pandemic. And so why don't we start up with just kind of brief ideas, a little bit background, about your experiences, doctor and your time there on the Navajo Nation. Dr. Paul Fuhrmeister All right, I normally do urgent care clinic here. So that's the kind of work I do. As it turned out in the spring, we were seeing very few patients here. So, our workload had was very light, but they were very, very heavy out of New Mexico in the Navajo area. So they were asking for volunteers, this organization, the COVID Care Force put out a call for volunteers. So, I answered that, and went out there for two weeks in May and two weeks in June, out to the Navajo reservation, I used to work out on the Indian Reservation before I moved to Oklahoma. So, I was familiar with that area. They were asking just for doctors and nurses to help out in all different places. They had extra work out there in the reservation, partly because they had a lot of sick people with the COVID. At the same time, some of their staff was getting burnt out or sick and not able to work. So, they had this strange situation where they had a lot of extra work, but then fewer and fewer people to do it. And that's why they needed some volunteers to come and help out. Plus, they had to set up a whole new clinic to do the COVID testing and things like that. In the follow ups, the contact tracing, there was just a lot of extra work. And so, they were very happy to have us come as volunteers. I went there with a team in May and worked at Shiprock Indian Hospital in Shiprock, New Mexico, and worked mostly outdoors doing the COVID testing in the parking lot of sick people for two weeks. Then in June, I went back out I went to Gallup New Mexico and worked at Rehoboth McKinley Christian Hospital, where they were also doing COVID testing in the parking lot. And I did a lot of interviewing of the patients by phone, people who were coming to be tested. So, on the phone, was it just kind of going over the symptom checklist before they get there? I asked them what their symptoms were, we asked them if they had been exposed. We asked them if they'd been around anybody that had a positive test, or if they had any deaths in their family or hospitalizations. And then we arranged for the test. And then we also gave them some recommendations and advice about how to keep well and whether or not depending on their symptoms, whether or not they should quarantine, whether they should wear masks all the time just reminding with some of those things and telling them when to expect the results of the tests and what to do if it was going to be positive or negative. So, there was a lot of information for us to give them as well. And sounds like reassurance to not just the information but the reassurance of here's the next step. Because not everybody knows what to do while you're waiting for that result. We had a script to tell them because a lot of people really didn't, you're right. They just did not know what they were going to do if it was positive. So, we just outline the steps to them and told them somebody would call them. And if, when they might need to get tested again, and so on. For the COVID care force, How did you hear about it and how did you join? The COVID care force was started by a doctor up