Overview
Beginning in early 2020, the ATS directed its attention to accelerating the creation and promotion of resources for our members and the broader pulmonary community to meet the unprecedented needs associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Almost simultaneously the Society was called on to help orchestrate outreach to volunteers to address a surge in critical care cases in New York City hospitals. Without a doubt, members who are working on the frontlines are experiencing an event that bears little resemblance to anything they have previously experienced in their professional lives. What has that been like? Personally? Professionally?
Your stories may help guide future crisis planning, research pursuits and critical care protocols. At a minimum, they will help inform and inspire your colleagues within the ATS community to successfully manage seemingly insurmountable challenges.
We have launched a “Call for COVID Stories” which will help tell the story of the COVID-19 pandemic, the amazing experiences of those who answered the call (or lived through it) and the ATS response.
All submissions should go to COVID19info@thoracic.org.
Permission to Share Your Information
By providing ATS your information and sharing your experience during the COVID pandemic, you agree to grant ATS permission to share your story with the public, as well as in ATS communications vehicles such as our websites, newsletters, social media platforms, conference-related content, and with members of the media.
Call for Stories: What Are We Looking For?
If you are interested in sharing your story, we will need your name and contact information, as well as the nature of your work. Are you a clinician in the ICU? Are you a nurse in the emergency room? Do you provide pulmonary rehab therapy to COPD patients? Are you a patient yourself? Whatever your story, we would love to have it. Below are some thought starters:
- Specialists – With the benefit of hindsight and having lived with COVID for 6 months now, what have we learned? Your stories may be about the daily encounters or challenges of working on the front lines.
- Working with colleagues
- Leading by example – stories of colleagues who have demonstrated true leadership through the pandemic, and thereby acted as an inspiration to those around them
- COVID and racial equality
- Improvisation – making do without PPE, medical supplies, space, etc.
- Volunteering at facilities struggling with the surge
- The patient / family members dynamic
- Impact on career – positive or negative
- Impact on the work-life balance (especially for women with young families)
- What else?/respondents’ choice
- Patients – What are the challenges faced by lung disease patients whose care was compromised by the COVID outbreak.
- Non-COVID patients – and their pulmonologists may discuss what treatment looks like for patients whose lung conditions worsened because they were unable to receive treatments they normally would (for e.g. Pulmonary Rehab)
- The role of industry – bringing resources to the COVID fight, partnering in new ways.
Deadline Extended: Dec. 9, 2020
