ASN 2021: Kidney Care Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic: Strategies for Supply & Staffing Shortages 

Announcer:
Welcome to the ASN Action Center on ReachMD. On this episode, we’re joined by Dr. Maureen Brogan, an Associate Professor of Medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the Clinical Director in the division of nephrology at Montefiore Medical Center. Dr. Brogan is here to share how COVID-19 impacted her clinical practice. COVID-19 was a popular topic covered at the American Society of Nephrology Kidney Week 2021. Here’s Dr. Brogan now.

Dr. Brogan:
So during the COVID pandemic, or at least here in the New York hospitals, we all joined together and had several meetings because we were running out of supplies. We didn't realize that COVID would cause so much acute kidney injury and requirements for dialysis. So we were running out of dialysis machines, dialysis fluids, and we all met together by Zoom meetings to figure out what we could do together. We reached out to the American Society of Nephrology that helped push the companies to get us those solutions faster.

We also came up with other ideas of how to deal with the issues within the hospital. For instance, I had a lot of dialysis nurses who got sick during the pandemic. So we needed to find other staff to be repurposed as dialysis nurses. So since there were less elective cardiac surgeries during the pandemic, the perfusionists at my hospital that run the heart machines functioned as dialysis nurses. And they were trained and worked on the continuous renal replacement therapy. Hospitals that had extra supplies, we borrowed supplies, we used home dialysis machines that were in the dialysis unit, and we brought them in to use as continuous renal replacement machines. We also wanted to protect the nurses that were still working in the hospital, so we got longer tubing for the dialysis machines, and we kept the machines outside the patient's room where they can be monitored. And then the nurse wouldn't have to go in the room every hour and be at risk for acquiring COVID.

Announcer:
That was Dr. Maureen Brogan sharing how COVID-19 impacted her clinical practice care, a topic that was highlighted during the American Society of Nephrology Kidney Week 2021. To access this and other episodes in our series, visit ReachMD.com/ASN, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening.