Medical student Whitney Johnson had recently gotten started with her surgery rotation when she got an email about two and a half weeks ago stating that in-person rotations would be postponed due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
While she didn’t yet have all the necessary training to be working in hospitals, the third-year med student at the University of Minnesota was looking for other ways to help. That is when Johnson happened upon a tweet from one of her med school classmates about MN CovidSitters.
She responded, and is now one around 340 students who are part of the group. They provide health care workers and others working in hospitals with child care. They also help fill other potential needs such as grocery shopping and pet sitting.
The organization, which began as just medical students from the U, quickly expanded to other health professional students at the U and then other college students in the area. They have matched 290 students with 180 families and are looking for 280 more volunteers with 90 families waiting to be matched.
“A lot of the families that have needed help are the people that teach us day in and day out and give their time to help us learn medicine,” Johnson said. “I think it’s been really powerful to be able to give back to those people that give so much to us and to the school and to their patients.”
Johnson is now MN CovidSitter’s director of volunteer recruitment. She and Jillian Millares, the director of community outreach, are part of the group’s 13-member board. The effort has grown much bigger than they initially envisioned and they are now in search of more student volunteers — any college or university student who is local, up-to-date on vaccinations and has passed a background check done by their school or employers can volunteer.
“A lot of people didn’t know what to do once the schools closed or once daycares closed and they weren’t sure where exactly the kids were going to go, so I think for them, it’s a huge relief,” Millares said.
What initially started fairly informally with Google Docs, has now evolved. MN CovidSitters has partnered with Clinician Nexus, which developed an app pro bono for the group that connects students with health care providers. They’ve also worked on growing their volunteer base via social media and put together a folder of resources to send to other groups of students around the country wanting to do the same in their cities.
While they are providing the services for free, often times families have tried to pay. Volunteers are adamant that they want this to be a voluntary service to decrease any financial burden this could have on families. Instead, Millares said, they’ve decided to redirect offers for compensation to community service organizations like homeless shelters and food shelves.
Medical student Regina Martinez, who got involved a couple weeks ago, babysits for a 3-year old boy, the son of an emergency physician and pharmacist. Martinez’s case is unique in that she knew the family prior to MN CovidSitters. She said she’s sat for the boy sometimes two days a week, other times closer to five or six. Multiple students are assigned to a family to ease the time burden on them as they are, after all, still full-time med students.
“They’re very, very grateful,” Martinez said of the family she sits for. “They say not just from their experience with me and (fellow sitter) Angelina (Omodt-Lopez) but also from coworkers that they have … that this is an essential service and a big need that we’re filling, so we’re really happy to be able to do this for them.”
