COVID Champions: Lisa Holmgren keeps the emergency department vigilant
Photo | Courtesy of Saint Vincent Hospital
Lisa Holmgren, emergency department nurse director at Saint Vincent Hospital
- Lisa Holmgren
- Emergency department nurse director
- Saint Vincent Hospital in Worcester
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Lisa Holmgren’s medical career started not in a doctor’s office or a hospital but in the U.S. Air Force.
Holmgren, who grew up in Spencer, was a surgical technician in the military, loved that she learned multiple jobs while in the Air Force, because in preparation for war, everyone had to know a bit about everyone else’s duties. It was in the Air Force she learned triage and surgery.
Those skills – and the ability to be calm in tense circumstances – would come back to help Holmgren in major ways this year with the coronavirus pandemic, which at one point brought dozens of patients sick with the virus to Saint Vincent Hospital in Worcester, where Holmgren is the nurse director of the emergency department.
Holmgren’s own experience and broader readiness of the Saint Vincent staff – they prepared for Ebola in 2014, for instance – went a long way toward giving the staff as much of a leg up as they could at a time when few knew how severe the coronavirus pandemic would get and how quickly it would spread.
“It just caught everyone off guard,” said Holmgren, who is in her second stint working at Saint Vincent, this time since 2015. “This hospital just came together as a team like never before. People stepped into roles that they weren’t normally.”
Holmgren, as the emergency department nurse director, was largely in charge of getting operations in place at the hospital’s ER, including setting up a tent just outside for patients to be screened and safely separating potentially contagious patients from those who were going in for other emergencies. Management was on-site around-the-clock during the early peak, she said, wanting to make sure the staff felt supported at any time of day with how quickly situations were changing and more information was coming to light.
“It doesn’t really matter what position you hold; when you work in these situations, you do whatever you can to be the care provider you want to be,” she said.
A first priority was keeping staff safe. Some at Saint Vincent were in charge of nothing other than making sure the hospital was stocked with enough personal protective equipment or other materials. Since then, keeping a mindset of staying vigilant and spreading the awareness of safe practices during the pandemic have taken on a greater role.
Saint Vincent, Holmgren emphasized, still saw symptomatic patients every day even when the pandemic was at a low point in Central Massachusetts over the summer. It’s health providers’ jobs in particular, she said, to continue to take risks seriously at a stage in the pandemic when many people might be tired of needing to stay at home or avoiding seeing friends or family or traveling.
The former Air Force part of Holmgren doesn’t allow her to dwell too much on the more heart-wrenching aspects of the pandemic, but she takes great pride in the role she and her colleagues played – and continue to play – in keeping people as healthy as possible and saving lives as the pandemic makes a fast rebound locally this fall.
“It’s something we’ll never forget,” she said. “And it’s something, to tell you the truth, that I’m proud to be a part of. I’m proud of the hospital and my peers and management. Everyone stepped up to the plate.”
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