UCSF - Connecting Patients and Families

At our hospitals, visitors are banned to limit spread of the novel coronavirus. As healthcare workers, one of the most challenging parts of our job over the past several weeks has been watching our patients be separated from their families at a time when they are most in need of love and support. We have witnessed family members not being able to say their last goodbyes , an experience sadly shared across the country . 

We are resident physicians and medical students in San Francisco that have launched a multi-hospital initiative to keep families together through the time of COVID. We are using tablets to facilitate video conferences between family/friends and their loved ones in the hospital. 

We have been piloting workflows at UCSF Medical Center, the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, and the San Francisco VA Medical Center. Using a tablet, today one of our residents helped a patient spend his last hours saying farewell to his mother and partner over video. Another patient, finally emerging from a long medically-induced coma, woke up to the face of her crying daughter on a tablet. She also started crying tears of joy. Yet another patient, nearing death from respiratory failure, had a Zoom conference with all three of her daughters so they could talk to her before she was intubated. These are just examples of using one tablet for one day at one hospital. 

We are ready to vastly expand our impact, and we need your help to get essential supplies, like more tablets, stands, secure storage, and cases. Together, we can profoundly change the experience of these patients and their loved ones during such a stressful time. We have an army of nurses, residents and medical students ready to deploy and expand our program. Your donations will cover the expenses to optimize our processes and expand our service to more patients, and even more healthcare facilities. 

Funds will be withdrawn by organizers and spent on behalf of the UCSF COVID Strike Team. The amount donated to each account will be noted in the campaign updates along with more patient stories. All patient stories shared have been de-identified of the 18 HIPAA Identifiers by the "Safe Harbor" method. Views or actions are our own as trainees and do not represent the voice of our employers.

Let’s connect families through COVID together.  

#ConnectingThroughCOVID