Covenant Foundation staff fill envelopes with gift cards from local restaurants as a way to say thank you to medical students helping with COVID-19 contact tracing. (Photo: Tracy Sopkow)
A generous donation from the ROHIT Group of Companies and Covenant Foundation is helping ensure that University of Alberta medical students tracking the spread of COVID-19 are taking care of themselves as they work to take care of others.
Rohit Gupta, president of the ROHIT Group, and his wife and faculty alumna, Neelam Gupta, '05 BMS, '06 MD, donated $10,000 to buy gift cards to local restaurants as a way of thanking the students for their amazing work.
"This pandemic is a life-changing event for a lot of us, particularly the U of A med students," said Rohit. "The trajectory of their education and careers has been interrupted, but the opportunity they have to get real-life experience helping through COVID-19 is going to prepare them for the next stage of their careers and help shape the way they practise medicine."
The donation and purchase of the gift cards were managed through Covenant Foundation, which has a long-standing relationship with the ROHIT Group of Companies, said Tracy Sopkow, Covenant Foundation CEO. Neelam works as an obstetrician at Covenant Health's Misericordia Community Hospital, which has programs and services supported by Covenant Foundation donors.
"The ROHIT Group has been a very generous donor to the foundation for a long time, and it was great to have them step up with this initiative," said Sopkow. "There is a lot of focus on frontline health-care workers, but there are also thousands of people behind the scenes who are doing very important work. It's great to be able to support them all."
Once they received the donation, Sopkow's team reached out to several Edmonton restaurants for gift cards, focusing on those with multiple locations for ease of access, healthy options and good variety. They quickly received responses from Famoso, Earls, Freshii and Oodle Noodle. In fact, the four restaurants were so eager to help, they donated another $1,000 worth of gift cards combined.
"We all felt gift cards were perfect because it's unique, it gives the students the flexibility to make choices for themselves, and is an easy way to say thank you," said Sopkow.
The Med Student Army
From the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, U of A medical students have stepped up to help fight the virus, so much so they are now being referred to as the "UAlberta Med Student Army." Early on, a group of medical students offered up free child-care services to frontline health-care workers, and a group of second-year medical students launched Bags Half Full Edmonton, a service that shops and delivers groceries to Edmonton seniors and the immunocompromised.
Currently, the gift cards are being used to thank the more than 140 third- and fourth-year medical students who are helping Alberta Health Services (AHS) in the critical task of contact tracing-collecting information from patients with COVID-19 to retrace their steps and anticipate where others may have been infected. More than 100 second-year medical students are now training to join them in the coming weeks.
After the associate dean of the MD program, Tracey Hillier, connected students with AHS in late March, third-year MD student Zosia Prus-Czarnecka began volunteering with the contact tracing group and is helping coordinate the shifts. For her, volunteering was an obvious choice.
"We all entered medical school wanting to be part of the health-care system," she said. "So when we were pulled from clinical rotation we still wanted to help with the pandemic in some manner. In a sense, our year of medical students is fortunate to have witnessed this historical moment and to have trained during a global pandemic. We got to witness first-hand how public health adapts and responds to a crisis and we will all carry forward lessons from this time into our future practices."
Teams of five students work in two eight-hour shifts. Each team is assigned a single case, tracing the movements of infected patients. This student contact-tracing task force has increased AHS's capacity nearly tenfold, and for each shift, every student volunteer receives a gift card as a thank you.
"It's been great to see the community come together," Prus-Czarnecka said. "There have been a lot of initiatives from local businesses, local restaurants and people in the community who want to support health care and medical students. Even though we're not in the hospitals it was wonderful to hear that somebody recognized our work here and the hours that students are putting into it."
"Overall this whole pandemic has really brought out some of the best sides of Edmonton and the community as a whole."