Back in January, Chief Medical Officer Dr. Alberto Esquenazi started hearing from friends in China and Japan about coronavirus and the difficulty of treating patients. He knew he had to be proactive in order to provide a clean, safe place to care for COVID-19 patients after they came off the ventilator.
“One of the resulting problems these patients may have is muscle weakness, may have nerve damage and pulmonary deficiencies, respiratory and cardiac issues. These patients really end up in need of rehabilitation after recovering from such an event,” he said.
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Some rehab centers in other countries started to repurpose their facilities to exclusively handle COVID-19 patients.
Esquenazi knew his facility would need to treat those with and without the virus — those who are recovering from COVID-19 and need rehab, and those in rehab who contract the virus. So, MossRehab set up a separate coronavirus unit.
“We are able to bring patients into a sealed unit — a unit that is separate from the rest of the hospital,” he added.
Workers have been trained to handle the new patients.
“(The unit) has its own group of staff, nurses, therapists, physicians, who provide care and are properly trained to actually have the safety measures when dealing with these patients.”