Alyssa Ryan’s graduation is postponed, and class has moved online for the remainder of her senior year.
That means no in-person lectures. No mock emergency room sessions for the senior-year nursing student at The College of New Jersey in Ewing.
She could’ve fretted about how she’ll receive her degree virtually in eight weeks, instead of in-person. But Ryan realized: what she’s learned in her nearly completed education might be useful to the agencies that need it most - in light of the coronavirus pandemic sweeping the country, which has killed at least 44 in New Jersey and brought schools and travel to a halt, while taxing the health care system.
“I could be upset, or I could go out into my community, answer my community’s call for help,” Ryan, a 21-year-old South Brunswick native, said Tuesday. She’s part of the NJ Medical Reserve Corps.
She’s been splitting her time between Meals on Wheels in Atlantic Highlands, where she had just finished up before speaking to NJ Advance Media. On Wednesday, she’ll do coronavirus phone triage at the Middlesex County health department, checking in with callers about their symptoms. Or it could be someone worried about prior contact with someone who tested positive.
The phone triager helps determine what care would be best for them, whether it’s self-quarantining for 14 days, going for a test, or heading to an emergency room if they are displaying severe symptoms.
Last week, she worked with the health department in Hamilton, Mercer County, and is continuing as a patient care technician in the NICU at St. Peter’s in New Brunswick, including over her spring break last week. She previously worked with schools in Middlesex County, but volunteers were soon asked to stay away for social distancing purposes.
Meals on Wheels, which primarily deals with seniors, is seeing increased demand, Ryan said. For example, a retirement home of senior citizens that used to take its residents to a grocery store on a bus, ceased that practice in response to the virus.
A cart of supplies, and some more bags, wheeled from the mock emergency room at TCNJ to Capital Health in Hopewell.Courtesy TCNJ
On Tuesday, she delivered groceries.
“It’s a great feeling knowing I can be there in a time of need,” she said.
TCNJ also stepped up in response to the coronavirus, sending medical supplies - which were loaded onto a cart in the ER lab, Ryan said - to Capital Health in Hopewell and to the Henry J. Austin Health Center in Trenton.
Those supplies include personal protective equipment like masks, gloves and gowns, Ryan said. Her instructors were telling her, it’s better to have it used than let it sit in a closet while in-person instruction is suspended. The lab is set up with supplies used in a functioning hospital so the instructors can run the simulations as close to real life as they can.
Several hospitals across the state have asked for donations of PPE, most of which is disposable, and ideally thrown out at the end of a shift if it’s a respirator. Regular surgical masks are switched out even more frequently, Ryan said.
“These items are critical to support and protect our frontline healthcare providers,” Carole Kenner, Dean of TCNJ’s School of Nursing, Health, and Exercise Science, said in a statement.
It’s a scary time, but Ryan, and many others, are going forward making themselves useful where they’re needed.
“We all have this skill base,” she said, and “it makes sense to use it for good.”
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Joe Brandt can be reached at jbrandt@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JBrandt_NJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook.