OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) – Right now, some Oklahoma medical professionals are taking on a new role to help their colleagues – making protective equipment that is in short supply.
There’s a mini factory of sorts where SSM Health St. Anthony employees are thinking outside the box.
It’s not their typical day job.
“Some of them would be working in radiology,” said Andrew Ochs with SSM Health St. Anthony. “A lot of them would normally have clinical roles that they would normally be doing.”
It’s also not what you’d typically see in the Santa Fe Family Life Center.
“Normally here in the facility we’d have adaptive sports, wheelchair basketball, kids camps, after school activities, youth sports just filing up the entire place,” said James Timberlake with the Santa Fe Family Life Center.
The mission of caring is continuing for both.
Ten at a time, employees are gathering to create much needed face shields for their co-workers on the front lines.
“We’re using this to build up our stockpile,” Ochs said.
While the focus is on COVID-19 right now, these employees are still able to get in hours of work, boosting supply and morale.
“It’s meeting a real concrete need but it’s also providing some really important level of hope to our hospital community as well,” said Ochs.
“It breaks our heart to not serve our normal population through our mission of programs so to jibe able to do a project like this it fills a huge need,” Timberlake said.
Staff says they expect to have 2,000 shields done by the end of Monday.
