Last year was tough for everyone, but it was particularly difficult on our unsung heroes: nurses.
Adina Jones, the AdvantageCare Physicians' regional clinical director for Brooklyn, worked throughout the pandemic recruiting interdisciplinary teams for nursing and patient care services, improving resource allocation, and implementing improved policies, management systems and programs.
Jones said the values taught to her in nursing school embodied her own, and the best way for her to achieve her goals as a nurse was to work in the community where she lived -- and that was especially the case through the pandemic.
"You know the neighboring restaurants, the challenges, the efficiencies, and the social determinants, so you yield positive results," she said.
Jones currently has a Masters in Nursing and an MBA, and has plans to get her Doctorate in Nursing to continue aiding the community, not only from a clinical perspective but from a financial standpoint as well.
"Having this role has really given me a sense of the gaps," she said. "Nursing as a whole, we do see the impact that some of these deficiencies contribute to the healthcare industry."
She said COVID-19 had exposed inequities amongst communities in terms of resources allocation, and she wanted to keep studying trends and statistics to make sure communities got what they needed.
"We've all been impacted, and I'm just trying to be an agent of change in those areas," she said.
Pandemic emergency
Jones said at the start of the pandemic it was a full on emergency phase, with nurses working non-stop for 24 hours a day.
"In early 2020, when we were really in lockdown, we strategized and opened up a lot of testing hubs in the neighborhoods that weren't being reached by the city and state testing centers," she told BK Reader.
That rampant testing in areas of increased cases and a pivot to telehealth for virtual appointments made a dramatic difference keeping COVID-19 cases down, she said.
She added that through partnerships with local elected officials, community organizations and churches, AdvantageCare was able to administer testing, and now vaccines, in communities of color and other places where it was needed the most.
So far, she said, the organization had distributed over 50,000 vaccines in the community across New York City.
