Above and beyond: Doctors honored for COVID-19 work
Courtesy of HHS Office of the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response
Responders from NDMS and the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps were on site at Travis Air Force Base on Feb. 5, 2020, to evaluate evacuees from Wuhan for COVID-19 symptoms. Dr. Tim Campbell served at the site, and transported patients from cruise ships to U.S. hospitals.
Courtesy of Tim Campbell
NDMS and other first responders evacuated individuals from cruise ships, including the Grand Princess and Diamond Princess, when they arrived on the west coast. Dr. Tim Campbell helped relocate passengers from cruise ships to U.S. hospitals, where Dr. Frank Gaudio assisted in treatment.
Courtesy of Tim Campbell
At the beginning of the pandemic, NDMS volunteers set up tent hospitals outside of traditional hospitals to house the overflow of COVID-19 patients. Dr. Tim Campbell worked in a tent hospital, he said.
Dr. Tim Campbell
Courtesy of Washington Health System
Dr. Frank Gaudio
Courtesy Frank Gaudio
Dr. Frank Gaudio
When COVID-19 arrived in the U.S., two area doctors were among the first deployed to national hotspots to care for those infected and assist with drafting pandemic protocol.
Dr. Tim Campbell, of Bethel Park, and Dr. Frank Gaudio, of Upper St. Clair, were recently awarded the COVID-19 Pandemic Civilian Service Award by the federal Health and Human Services department for their efforts as part of the PA-1 Disaster Medical Assistance Team.
The award, authorized by the U.S. Surgeon General, was bestowed upon 1,400 National Disaster Medical System volunteers who spent at least 30 consecutive days or 60 days total providing medical care during the pandemic.
“Tim and Frank, man, they deploy just about every time they possibly can,” said Dr. Michael Beach, a retired University of Pittsburgh nursing professor who has since March 2020 served as commander of PA-1. “The last two years, three years, that has been primarily COVID relief missions. Beginning with the people from Wuhan and Diamond Princess that were brought back to the United States and placed in quarantine through our latest missions … Frank and Tim, anytime we needed them, we called and they responded. They were phenomenal.”
Both Campbell and Gaudio work full time as doctors – Campbell serves as Chief Medical Officer for Gallagher Home Health Services and Hospice; Gaudio is an emergency care physician for Washington Health System – and, in their free time or with vacation days, volunteer with PA-1. The pair deploy as part of the Department of Health and Human Service’s NDMS to natural disaster and other sites, where volunteers assist local hospitals and emergency teams in patient care, relocation and various other missions.
“We’re kind of like a mobile asset for Health and Human Services,” said Campbell. “If there was a hurricane, an earthquake, a flood, they’d send us out. It’s a pretty cool asset, to think we can go anywhere – a field, a parking garage, the drive-up to a hospital.”
Historically, Campbell said, DMAT teams are deployed to sites devastated by nature, and both area doctors have served across the U.S. and in Puerto Rico following hurricanes. During the Ebola outbreak, Campbell and Gaudio were sent to Atlanta, and both worked in New Mexico and Arizona, administering shots as thousands of children crossed the border.
They’ve stood by during national events, including the State of the Union, and were present while Hershel Williams, the last surviving WWII Medal of Honor recipient, lay in state.
The local doctors have acquired stories and skills throughout their time with PA-1, but working on the frontlines of COVID-19 was an unusual challenge.
“Early on in the pandemic, we didn’t have a clue what we were up against,” said Campbell, who helped transport passengers from cruise ships on the western U.S. coast to hospitals for treatment. “We knew that this was highly, highly infectious, much more than your standard coronavirus. We’d bring (people) into quarantine, we’d watch them. We’d try to develop a lot of the policies. Imagine, as chief medical officer, I had CDC on my left hand, public health on my right. We’d all sit down and talk. At the time, we had no treatment. We had no vaccines, no antibodies, no monoclonals. It was a little scary.”
Campbell was deployed three times at the beginning of 2020, for a total of 12 pandemic deployments.
“The bulk of my deployments were going to these hospitals that were overrun with COVID. They had every room saturated. You might have a 20-bed ICU, and we’d have 90 people on ventilators. In Jackson, Mississippi, we built a tent hospital at the bottom of the parking garage.”
Gaudio spent about two months across three deployments navigating the early stages of the pandemic in hospitals in the South.
“For some reason, they sent me to Texas, at an Air Force base,” Gaudio said. “There were a couple cruise ships, and as those ships were repatriating people to the U.S., they were flown to one of three places. They came to the Air Force base that I was at in Texas. We then screened all the passengers. We actually separated out the people who had COVID from the people who didn’t,” said Gaudio, who also spent time at an infectious disease institute. “About 20 people and myself … were allowed to use two wings of this facility to treat these (COVID) patients for as long as it took.”
Gaudio and Campbell agreed their experiences at the beginning of the pandemic helped them combat COVID-19 when it arrived full-force in the Pittsburgh region.
“I think the experience that I had, we were really at the very initial point of learning what COVID does to patients, the kind of complications that you see, the kinds of protection, the PPE that you need to wear. Our experiences really put us at the forefront of knowing how to deal with this,” Gaudio said.
Campbell taught local nursing home, police, fire and HAZMAT staff how to safely perform their duties while protecting themselves and the public from COVID. A talk he published on YouTube near the beginning of the pandemic, on the importance of wearing masks, garnered tens of thousands of views, Campbell said.
Together, the doctors established vaccine clinics in the Pittsburgh region, and headed the largest monoclonal antibody clinic in North America.
“Knowledge is power. We brought back a lot of practical knowledge. We brought that back and were able to translate it into meaningful service,” Campbell said.
Gaudio said that he and Campbell could not have done important work related to COVID without the support of the DMAT community.
“We’re just two doctors in Southwestern Pennsylvania,” he said. “We could not do what we came to do if we did not have the paramedics, nurses, the team commanders, the department commanders, the logistics people, the administrative people, our administrative office. We even brought a mental health specialist with us. She does a wonderful job, because people get out there and you’re seeing things that you can’t unsee. This is a group effort.”
Training received through DMAT helped prepare the physicians.
“Some of the training was very prescient: Even before COVID occurred, we were being trained on highly infectious diseases,” Campbell said.
But mostly, it was trial and error to battle COVID-19.
“This was not our normal, what we normally respond to, but it was needed and we stepped forward,” said Beach. “It was hard because almost every place that they pulled people, they were facing staffing shortages and staff burnout and everything else locally. To be called upon to go someplace else in the country to relieve them, that was difficult. My team stepped up, responded right from the beginning, whenever they were needed.”