Caring for our caregivers
Every day, members of our community are stepping up to help ensure that our health care workforce has the resources needed to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.
Author: Cecily Williams
Supply and demand
One morning in early March, Mike McCaffrey woke up and watched a news story about nurses in a Washington hospital making face shields and masks out of office supplies and sheets. He was appalled. “This can’t happen here,” he said. As the associate vice president of logistics at OHSU, McCaffrey preemptively looked into options to […]
A man with a plan
For David Zonies, MD, MPH, there’s never a dull moment — and he prefers it that way. Zonies is a trauma surgeon in OHSU’s Division of Trauma, Critical Care and Acute Care Surgery, as well as the Director of Surgical Critical Care and the Extracorporal Life Support program at OHSU, a program he started when […]
Building a COVID-19 testing lab
Two weeks. That’s all it took for Donna Hansel, MD, PhD, and her team, together with colleagues at the OHSU Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute, to build, stock and staff a new clinical testing laboratory for COVID-19 — all from scratch. The brand-new microbiology lab enables OHSU researchers to process COVID-19 tests in-house, for faster […]
Resource relief
Anthony Cheng, MD, an OHSU primary care physician, enjoys family medicine because it puts him at the intersection of science and story. His work as a clinician is grounded in listening to the patient and learning what makes them who they are. Cheng also brings that single-minded focus to his work as the medical director […]
‘Our lab was made to do this’
As the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the globe, health care workers worried they would run out of ventilators needed to keep the sickest patients alive. That’s when Albert Chi, MD, MSE, an OHSU trauma surgeon, sprang into action. At the first signs of an impending ventilator crisis, Chi pivoted his lab — which previously pioneered […]
Stepping up in times of crisis
Physicians swear an oath to dedicate their lives to serving others. That spirit of service is what led Alix Cooper, MD, to pursue a career in medicine. Nearly one month ago, Cooper was celebrating their acceptance to the Cascades East Family Medicine Residency Program in Klamath Falls, Oregon, with a Match Day hike around Upper […]
Caring for patients, families and Oregon
At OHSU Doernbecher Children’s Hospital, Dawn Nolt, MD, MPH, specializes in caring for children with infectious diseases. She’s also the pediatric medical director for the department of Infection Prevention and Control. That means not only does she care for children at OHSU, she also cares for OHSU itself, as if it were a patient. She […]
Donors make all the difference
Every day we learn more about COVID-19 — how to slow its spread and how to minimize its impact on our communities. Members of the OHSU community are working together and providing leadership to the State of Oregon on how to care for patients, protect our health care workers, fight the pandemic and, most importantly, […]
Making a difference for patients
Matthias Merkel, MD, PhD, has always had a tendency to run toward difficult situations. This instinct kicked in at the age of 16, when he became a Red Cross volunteer in his home country of Germany and continued as a paramedic in the German emergency medical services system. That experience, coupled with his passion for […]
