As the COVID-19 pandemic started to become more prevalent in Nevada, three medical school students at Touro University Nevada quickly responded to help serve Southern Nevada’s needs.
By late March, they launched a website to gather student volunteers to address these needs — from online tutoring, dog walking and even disseminating falsehoods about the virus.
“We all as medical students want to help, it’s just in our nature,” said Cassandra McDiarmid, who plans to go into obstetrics and gynecology when she finishes school.
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But as a second-year medical student, McDiarmid didn’t have the clinical training to be on the medical front lines fighting the virus.
“We saw there was a need for clinical assistance, but wanted to have something that was not clinical-related such as tutoring and grocery shopping to help out in any way we could,” she said. “We were trying to come up with a way to put all this information in one place and make it easily accessible.”
The idea for the site was personal, said fourth-year student Ashlie Bloom, as they thought of their own families and older relatives who will likely need assistance for the long haul.
“I would like to see it stay,” Bloom said. “I think these are things that are needed at all times.”
The website offers portals for free K-12 online tutoring and undergrad tutoring, where those who need it can connect with student volunteers on a holistic set of subjects. Vulnerable populations who need help with grocery shopping, or health care workers who need dog walking or lawn care assistance can also fill out a form online outlining their specific needs.
Parisun Shoga, also a second-year medical student, took the reins in constructing a COVID-19 information page, where she provided a list of credible news articles and scientific journals on the virus.
Shoga said she got the idea from talking to her mother, who would often come to her with false information she’d hear about the virus from her friends or on Facebook.
“I felt it was important,” Shoga said. “I’m sure a lot of us have family members who aren’t getting the right news and are seeing and taking in everything they get, falling victim to everything they hear.”
The page summarizes COVID-19 updates each day with reputable news organizations and scientific reports. Updates are also available on Twitter @TouroNVmedready.
“I am overwhelmed with pride and gratitude for go-getter students like Cassi, Parisun and Ashlie who have turned this crisis into an opportunity to make a positive difference for our community,” said Shelley Berkley, CEO and senior provost, Touro University Nevada. “The opportunity to have medical students help our community’s K-12 students with free online tutoring or assist other students preparing for the MCAT is simply amazing and unprecedented.”
Touro faculty staff and students have been eager to jump in since the start. When Clark County and the city of Las Vegas partnered to construct a temporary homeless shelter at Cashman Center, medical and physician students volunteered to perform screenings for the hundreds of homeless individuals.
Third-year osteopathic medical student Amanda Hertzler said she was eager to jump in when she got the call to help.
“I think one of the biggest things I’ve learned is that anything we do in any small way is helping,” she said. “It’s amazing to see how we can all come together as a society to help protect those who are high-risk.”
Some of the school’s nursing students have also been the front lines in the hospitals seeing coronavirus patients, Berkley said.
This month, the school is set to graduate 135 future doctors, with about a third completing their residencies in Southern Nevada, she added.
“The more residency programs we can create in Southern Nevada, the more likely it is that these doctors will remain in Nevada to practice medicine,” she said.
Touro has also been active in assembling test kits to send to the Southern Nevada Health District for distribution. School faculty is supervising the production of these kits with student support. Berkley said she anticipates the school will produce a total of 20,000 kits this month.
After receiving a donation of 80,000 masks from the Cyrus and Michael Tang Foundation, Touro distributed them to hospitals, nursing homes and doctor offices all over Southern Nevada. Berkley said they’ve recently received an additional 120,000 marks that they plan to distribute to the medical community as well.
The masks were instrumental in some of these offices being able to reopen, said Dr. Daniel Burkhead, owner of Innovative Pain Care Center in Las Vegas.
“Without those masks, it would have been very difficult for my staff to refocus on reopening,” he said. “They were a crucial component in making sure we had the equipment we needed to protect ourselves.”