By MARTY LEVINE
One life-changing event prompted Kate Brownlee to make a career of ensuring healthcare was a safe, and safe-feeling, experience for patients: The diagnosis of her daughter, now 22, with leukemia at age 3.
Brownlee, director of operations at Pitt’s Vaccination and Health Connection Hub in Nordenberg Hall, had just moved back to Pittsburgh with her young family after teaching high school in Philadelphia during the first 10 years of her career. “We spent a lot of time at Children’s (Hospital),” she recalls. “The doctors and nurses there were phenomenal, amazing, but the system in which they worked did not strike me as so phenomenal.
“So I decided to change my life course, save the American healthcare system, and focus my master’s degree on health improvement,” Brownlee said at a Staff Council Coffee and Conversation event on March 7.
Eventually, she began working at UPMC on quality improvement for patients, and then moved to Pitt during the pandemic as the project manager for the COVID Medical Response Office, which in the last few years morphed into the Hub.
“I obviously have a lot of experience dealing with small children going through stressful situations, and I think one of the great things about Children’s was that my daughter, even though she went through a lot of really terrible, painful, unpleasant situations, her memories of Children’s are very positive. She likes going to Children’s. She doesn’t actually want to move on … to adult care …. She was sad when chemo ended because that meant that she wouldn’t see her oncologist and her oncology nurses much. I was not sad when chemo ended but the fact that they … gave her such a warm, safe place to be for two and a half years is in addition to obviously saving her life.
“That is such an incredible testament to the work that they do at Children’s and the care that they provide. Taking care of the psychological side of patients as well as the medical side of patients makes such a difference as to whether people are willing to accept care.”
That certainly dovetails with her current work at the Hub, she explains: “I’m not a clinician, so I can’t vaccinate people, or save people’s lives that way. But helping the institution figure out how to meet the safety needs of the community, also trying to keep a focus on how to keep students’ lives as normal as possible” during the pandemic and its aftermath, are her goals today.
“I have kids college-age and so I saw what they went through during the pandemic and how hard it was on them. And so being able to do my little part to help keep the institution running as seamlessly as possible was something that I felt like I could do.”
The Hub is not only a preventive medical care facility, but “an inter-professional education space,” Brownlee says, where many types of health-sciences students can learn and serve both Pitt and its surrounding community members thanks to the Hub's close partnership with the University Pharmacy through Student Health Services.
“They check people into the front desk,” she says. “They provide education. They provide vaccination. For me, it’s a really nice combination of getting back to where I started, with working with students, and seeing these young people grow. … You really see them step into a role as a clinician and caregiver, trying to work on the patient-care side of things and making it a positive experience for patients, which is something that I hold near and dear.”
Helping to create and run Pitt’s response to the pandemic was also a crucial moment, she says. As the vaccines first became available, more than a year into the pandemic, she recalls the earliest need to vaccinate healthcare workers who were not direct UPMC employees and so had trouble getting access to the vaccine, as well as older and more vulnerable segments of the population: “It was little bit crazy at first. We would send out an e-mail to a thousand people and say, ‘Go down to UPMC South Side tomorrow between these hours, go get your COVID vaccine,’ and then eventually we formed our partnership with the Allegheny County Health Department so they provided the vaccine.”
She recalled the days of students and staff pitching in for those early vaccination clinics at the Petersen Events Center: “We initially had shuttle buses going up from Soldiers and Sailors to take people up to the Pete. We had public health students pushing people in wheelchairs. It was just an all-hands-on-deck kind of thing.”
Eventually Pitt was offering vaccines to people in such neighborhoods as Homewood and the Hill District, organized very quickly: “These were all for people who were over 65,” she recalled. “We had all these people who hadn’t been out of their houses for a year. They were all dressed up in their church finest. One woman had a mask made out of pictures of her grandkids. People were crying because they were going to see their grandchildren for the first time in a year. So that was probably the most satisfying but also the craziest time. The whole mass vaccination clinic was pretty intense, but it was also very satisfying because you knew you were giving people life-saving vaccines.”
In time, she said, “it basically became clear that we could not, as COVID wasn’t going away, just keep taking over the Petersen Events Center for mass vaccine clinics. We needed a more a more permanent solution.” Hence the Hub. Nowadays the spot offers many more vaccinations, including pre-travel consultations and shots, as well as wellness checkups and much more. (See March 7 University Times story.)
“Medical students can vaccinate, pharmacy students can vaccinate, nursing students can vaccinate,” Brownlee points out. “A lot of different students stepped up to the plate to help with the mass vaccine clinics, and so our executive director, Melissa McGivney, realized that this was really an opportunity to involve students in interprofessional learning in a somewhat different way than they usually are. … I don’t think there are a lot of universities that have set up this interprofessional care space, post-pandemic.”
She and the Hub staff are still looking for more ways to build up their mission, she said.
“There is a real crisis right now in community pharmacies because the reimbursement rate for drugs is unconscionably low, and so it is currently estimated that up to one third of community pharmacies are going to close in the next year, because they just can’t make a go of it,” she said.
“Pharmacies are looking for ways to stay afloat and things like doing travel consultations or additional services that are kind of outside the box, or wellness screenings or things like that, connecting people to care in different ways” may be a solution.
“One of the things that we started brainstorming or percolating yesterday was, could we use the time in the spring and summer, when we’re not as busy, to do trainings for other independent pharmacies and bring them in and teach the lessons that we’ve learned about how to stand up these things, so that they can be more likely to be able to stay?
“I really like the fact that we in our small way are trying to meet people where they are,” she concluded, “and connecting them to the care that they need. I think we do pretty well and I find it very deeply satisfying.”
The next Staff Council Coffee and Conversation will be 10:30-11 a.m. April 18 with Anantha Shekhar, senior vice chancellor for the health sciences, in Alumni Hall’s Connelly Ballroom.
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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