Nurse Michelle Vaughan (Photo courtesy Bon Secours)
An ICU nurse at Bon Secours St. Mary's Hospital has found a way to bring a comforting word from loved ones to people in her unit who are being treated for severe COVID-19 infections.
Intubated and sedated, the patients are on ventilators and unable to respond. Because the virus is so infectious, they also are unable to have family members at hand in a time of need. But they can hear, and in March the nurse, Henrico resident Michelle Vaughan, came up with the idea of giving each patient a plush toy that also had a recording in it made by the patient's loved ones. The bears are placed in a patient's arms, and the nurses activate the recordings each time they go in to tend to the patient.
“We can let them hear a family member talking to them,” Vaughan says. It's a way for loved ones to share prayers and encouragement, and the bears are placed near the patients' hearts, so they can feel them, too. “They are hearing their family members continuously.”
The project is called Be There Bears.
Vaughan says she saw a need for that connection after working with one of the hospital's first COVID-19 patients, who was desperately ill and could have no family with her. “That was horrible; it ripped at our hearts,” she says. “We had to figure out what to do. It just didn't feel right that we couldn't connect them.”
She saw the need, and she came up with the idea of talking bears through a family connection: her parents in a video reading a book to her children, which the children love. Vaughan found toys that combined the plush housing and the recording mechanism, but they were pricey, so she began crafting her own in her off time, first at home, and then coworkers became involved.
A dozen of the plush toy devices have been made so far, she says. “They're very cute; they're really nice bears.”
Vaughan would like to have the bears available to patients in the ICU even after the COVID-19 crisis passes. Even though family members are generally allowed into the ICU in other situations where contagion is not a concern, many family members are unable to visit, for reasons ranging from being unable to take time off from work to being unable to afford to travel, Vaughan notes.
“I'm hopeful that we can continue [using the bears] with those kind of populations,” she says.
The hospital is providing the materials for the project, but members of the public can provide donations of supplies to Bon Secours to help with COVID-19 shortages.
