Dr. Jamie Krashnin: It felt like crisis on crisis. Because it was still– this was also I think the Delta wave of Covid happening, and so there’s that. And it felt like there were always all these changes to our practices throughout Covid and now this on top of it. Our nurses were already burned out. Medical assistants were burned out. And I’m not a medical director of our clinic, just a clinician there, but my memory of it is, we would try to see as many patients as we could in a day, but we were still backlogged, and kind of doing anything we could to take care of patients on the terms that they needed, which started to lead to losing staff. Because several months in, it was apparent this wasn’t something that was going to go away or change, and that we couldn’t run a clinic losing nurses and medical assistants. We had to find a way to make things sustainable. There would be periods where we didn’t have nurses or we’d have new nurses. Even just little things like having to go pull your own meds or somebody having to come in from whatever else they were doing, like another doctor, to run the sedation for that one patient who needed to get home by a certain time. Or somebody comes in and they risk out-of-clinic care because now you have so much volume that even though it’s rare to risk out-of-clinic care for your health reasons, when you have enough people, that 1 in 100 person becomes a lot more frequent. So then having to add on cases to the operating room. And then the operating room is filled with people who have different opinions on abortion care and things like that. But we’ve had enough nurses and prep tech support from the operating room that we could do that, but it also meant then calling people in when you don’t have your blocked time or your set time. And our fellows having to do a lot of coordination and being called in a lot more often to take care of people than they did before [Texas] Senate Bill 8. It also came with hearing patients’ stories, taking that home every night, and the same for our nurses and medical assistants, and just carrying that with us too.
