Wanting to help people in need is why I work in public health in the first place. Seeing New York’s COVID-19 response in action on such a large scale has been inspiring and meaningful to me personally."
HELENA MIRZOYAN MPH'20
At NYC Health + Hospitals, the nation's largest public health system in New York City, Helena Mirzoyan MPH'20 has been helping the organization quickly scale their telehealth capabilities. Working as part of the Office of Population Health’s COVID-19 Rapid Response Team, she has helped to launch video visit and televisit initiatives so that New Yorkers can continue to receive the care they need while staying safe at home. “New York City has been the epicenter of the pandemic in the U.S.,” Mirzoyan says. “What stands out to me most is how readily people rolled up their sleeves to help each other out.”
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Much of my Dartmouth Institute training has enabled me to develop protocols and processes to successfully prepare our emergency department and hospital medicine practice for patients with COVID-19."
PEARLY ITTICKATHRA MD, MPH'15
Pearly Ittickathra MD, MPH’15 is the site director for an emergency medicine and hospital medicine practice in an urban critical access hospital in Washington, D.C. The hospital caters to a medically underserved community in the southeastern part of the city. Her COVID-19 response work has included supporting her team in developing protocols and processes for separating and screening patients in the emergency room.
“I'm incredibly proud of my team's adaptability, the passion to provide quality care, and the steps they have taken to support nursing staff,” Ittickathra says. “I have watched them train nurses on how to perform COVID testing, and volunteer to take items into patient rooms to reduce the number of people exposed to COVID patients. They have looked at the 10,000-foot view and worked to make the system better.”
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My Dartmouth Institute training provided me with a deeper understanding of healthcare systems, which has allowed me to design more effective plans for responding to this crisis."
MEREDITH MACMARTIN MD, MS'19
As the director of inpatient clinical services for palliative care at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, Meredith MacMartin MD, MPH’19 has been involved in extensive contingency planning for COVID-19 response at the hospital. Her work has included collaborating with ICU and hospital medicine services, contributing to crisis standards of care, and coordinating the palliative care response. Additionally, she has been providing some telehealth palliative care support for NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia.
You can also find her on Twitter at @GraniteDoc, where she is a curator and contributor to #pallicovid, an international Twitter-based collaborative of palliative care providers developing policies and procedures for palliative care in the response to COVID-19.
TACKLING THE CHALLENGES OF COVID-19
During this unprecedented crisis, Dartmouth Institute students and alumni are impassioned more than ever to improve the health of their communities.