"It is setting the stage for a national look at whether this is a reasonable approach to really dealing with our mental health crisis," said Dr. Bruno Anthony, Vice Chair of the CU School of Medicine's Department of Psychiatry.
Researcher and Professor of Emergency Medicine at University of Colorado Anschutz Campus Dr. Emmy Betz weighed in, saying surprisingly, Colorado has one of the highest suicide rates in the nation, ranked 7th. This new tool will help combat that.
The trick moving forward will be scaling that and other systems up and down as needed, said Dr. Lisa Miller, a professor of epidemiology at the Colorado School of Public Health. “We’ve made huge advances as far as therapy and treatment for COVID-19, vaccines for COVID-19, the way we monitor it,” Miller said.
“I think people are still going into nursing for all the right reasons,” said Dr. Tammy Spencer, assistant dean of the undergraduate program at the CU College of Nursing and a veteran nurse who still does hospital shifts. She reads the applications. “I still get that theme. ‘I want to help people, I want to make a difference. I’ve had an experience myself or with my family that has really drawn me into this profession.’”
“We are in a spike directly caused by the unvaccinated,” said Dr. Richard Zane, Chief Innovation Officer for UCHealth and Chair of Emergency Medicine for the CU School of Medicine. “Those patients are almost all in the areas with the lowest vaccination rates.”
“The number I track most closely is the number of people admitted into the hospital. I think that is a strong indicator of how severe the cases we’re having,” Elizabeth Carlton, Colorado School of Public Health Assistant Professor. Carlton has been tracking and researching the data since the outbreak started. “Let’s put it in perspective. On average in December when things were at their worst in Colorado, we were admitting about 290 people per day, the last few weeks it’s been as high as 100 per day on average, now we’re dropping down to 70 people,” she said.
“We were able to determine that she had the triggers in her bloodstream that would suggest that it comes from the vaccine,” said Dr. R. Todd Clark, assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. Dr. Clark knew the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had warned against standard blood clot medicine to treat the side effect, but no alternative was clear. “We made the call for Bivalirudin based off of the best available evidence,” Dr. Clark said.
“We were anticipating that once the vaccines were going to become available, we would need to be able to have our students ready to go to support these efforts. They have a few experiential requirements, but this is going to be above and beyond what students would normally do. So, we thought why not make it fun, let’s create a competition,” said Dr. Dana Hammer the Faculty Lead for Student Professional Development in the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences on the CU Anschutz Medical Campus.
