Students from UMB and Johns Hopkins University come together to support health care workers in Baltimore City.
Editor's Note: This post is part of a series of Helping Hands stories authored by School of Pharmacy faculty, staff, students, trainees, and alumni who stepped up to assist their family and friends, colleagues, and communities during the COVID-19 pandemic.
For the past couple of weeks, I and a few medical students from Hopkins and Maryland have organized to support health care workers in Baltimore City. With the closure of schools across the state, it became apparent that health care workers would be needing support in their personal lives. My team and I were able to recruit 300 graduate health students from UMB and Hopkins to volunteer. While official institutional child care services were being implemented, our group was able to be fill in the child care gap for front-line health care workers across the city.
In addition to child care, our group was able to partner with local community leaders to organize a citywide personal protective equipment (PPE) drive in which we collected thousands of PPE items to donate to the Baltimore City Health Department. Currently, we are working on efforts to put together care packages for health care workers in the city. If this is something you want to help out with, please fill out this Google form. If you have new ideas on how health profession students can support health care workers, please reach out to me by email at myirefu@umaryland.edu.