The Best of Times

In planning the North Building, the PFAs and Suburban management realized that a Patient and Family Resource Center would be a wonderful resource for Suburban patients and their loved ones. This center could serve as a central location for patients and families to obtain information on wellness, various diseases, nutrition and other resources from Suburban Hospital and Johns Hopkins Medicine. Given the space limitations, this information would need to be provided primarily in electronic form.

With a commitment from management, the PFAC set about planning how to make the Resource Center a reality. Different teams of PFAs addressed the furniture and computer needs for the Resource Center, developed a curated list of resources to be available, and brainstormed staffing and training requirements for PFAs and other volunteers working in the center. We were fortunate to have Mr. Jarrod Irwin, a Consumer Health Coordinator for the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, attend the December 2019 PFAC meeting to train members in how to properly provide consumer health information. Mr. Irwin’s wide-ranging instruction covered the breadth of health information that is available, accurate and suitable for the non-medical professional; strategies for having conversations about health and health literacy; and the ethics of providing health information.

The Worst of Times

In March 2020, shortly after the opening of the Patient and Family Resource Center, the growing COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the entire Johns Hopkins Medicine system limiting non-patient access to all its hospitals in order to limit the spread of the virus. This necessary decision had wide-ranging impacts, including the shutdown of Suburban’s new Resource Center. In addition, and of particular concern, was the resulting limited access to patients by their family and care partners. This restriction applied to all inpatients, outpatients, and emergency department patients.

One key tenet of patient- and family-centered care is that the patient’s care partner is an essential member of the care team. In normal times, this means that, with few exceptions, the care partner has 24/7 access to the patient. That “family presence” policy had to give way to the extremely infectious nature of COVID-19 and unprecedented efforts to control the pandemic. With input from the PFAC, Suburban’s staff worked to establish alternate forms of communication to keep patients, their families and care partners, and staff in touch with each other. Modern communication tools such as cell phones, tablets and teleconferencing software provided the means of doing this. (See the Patient- and Family-Centered Care Clinical Community article for more information on the PFAC’s efforts to facilitate the presence of care partners in the hospital during the pandemic.)

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