When Rhode Island announced its first case of COVID-19 on March 1, 2020, nurse Tenah Nimmo-Powell and her colleagues thought the virus was something like the flu, she told The Herald.
Just a few months later, Nimmo-Powell and her colleagues were helping move deceased patients outside of the nursing home center where she worked so that they could be picked up by funeral homes. Patients had been “dying back-to-back” that week and “everybody was panicking,” she explained.
Nimmo-Powell is just one of the many health care workers in Rhode Island who provided critical care during the COVID-19 pandemic, which claimed nearly 4,500 lives in the state.
“It was very surreal. I would go to work and I would wear an N95 (mask) for two straight years,” Jason Drapeau, a nurse at Butler Hospital, said in an interview with The Herald.
At the same time, “we were dealing with personal stuff like the rest of the public,” said Carol Lewis, a primary care pediatrician at Hasbro Children’s Hospital and a professor of pediatrics at Brown’s Warren Alpert Medical School.
For Lewis, one of the hardest parts of the pandemic was seeing how it affected her patients — many of whom were refugees, low-income and on the Medicaid program. She also highlighted difficulty with not being able to “connect with families” in the same way, now separated by laptop screens and layers of PPE.
But five years later, all three workers felt that the health care industry has continued to struggle since the pandemic, particularly with workforce shortages.
Staffing numbers “were bad before the pandemic,” Nimmo-Powell said. “Now, it’s worse.”
For Lewis, physician burnout is higher now than it was before the pandemic. She also highlighted Rhode Island hospitals’ high occupancy rates driven by the state’s persistent workforce shortages, The Herald previously reported.
“They don’t retain staff because they’re not paying the staff enough,” said Lewis, who noted that low Medicaid reimbursement rates and paychecks in Rhode Island have driven workers out of the state’s health care jobs.
“At the beginning of the pandemic, I was less worried about paying my bills than I am now,” Drapeau said. Despite holding over 20 years of professional experience, Drapeau’s wages have remained stagnant amid growing inflation and costs of living, he explained.
Since the start of the pandemic, health care workers have put in extra hours to facilitate adequate patient care, according to Drapeau. Between 2020 and 2022, for example, Drapeau worked “anywhere between 13 and 19 shifts” in a two-week span, which he claimed was above average.
Aside from workforce shortages, Lewis emphasized there has been a “change in the culture of medicine” in recent years. She noted that it feels like health care providers have increasingly prioritized productivity and patient volume over other aspects such as cultivating patient relationships.
Since the pandemic, there “seems to be much more concern about the bottom line,” Lewis said, adding that physicians are not always incorporated in conversations “about how best to serve our patients.”.
Earlier this month, dozens of unionized health care workers gathered outside the State House to rally against Gov. Dan McKee’s fiscal year 2026 budget, which is set to cut hospital funding and Medicaid increases, The Herald previously reported.
“I’m here, I’m ready to provide that care,” Drapeau said. But “if the governor wants to decrease funding for hospitals who already have wage stagnation, vacancies and turnover problems, then I think we all know what he thinks about our most vulnerable citizens.”
McKee’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Megan is a metro editor covering health and environment. Born and raised in Hong Kong, she spends her free time drinking coffee and wishing she was Meg Ryan in a Nora Ephron movie.
