This weekend, a friend of mine, shared a Facebook essay by Dr. Joshua Lerner, an Emergency Medicine Physician in Southbridge, Massachusetts. It was a message from the “trenches” at the Leominster campus of UMass Memorial HealthAlliance-Clinton Hospital.
Dr. Lerner’s post — which has been shared over 3,500 times at the time of publishing — is a stirring call-to-action to manufacture, produce, and volunteer materials and labor to considerably step up response efforts. Dr. Lerner stressed that in the richest country in the world, N295 masks, gowns, face shields, and gloves should be available in surplus so that each person can have what they need to be as safe and as protected as possible while on the job. Right now assurances, bureaucratic talk, and loosened safety guidelines are simply not enough.
This comes at a critical time when hospitals and emergency responders are facing dwindling PPE supplies. The chilling truth is that we are starkly underprepared and slow to respond to this global pandemic. But we do have the resources and talent to turn things around. Large enterprises have the supply chain capabilities to answer the need for manufacturing and deployment. 3M, Proctor and Gamble, and other large organizations have the ability to mass-produce much of this PPE equipment. Amazon can expedite supplies to hospitals. Like times of war and crisis in American history, everyone — from individuals to corporations — can pitch in to make sure that the front lines are supplied with resources for battle.
It is a privilege to feel safe at home and sheltered against the chaos that the coronavirus is causing outside our front doors. It is time for each one of us to answer the call of those who are risking their health and safety to make sure that others receive life-saving care. We are all in this together.
#OneTeamOneFight #GetMePPE
