Working as a medical professional is a stressful job at the best of times, but with the COVID-19 pandemic, the pressures on doctors, nurses and technicians at Kingston’s hospitals and clinics are enormous.

To help ease their burdens, a large group of medical and dental students has started volunteering to do things that will help make local medical professionals’ personal lives easier. For the past few days, students have been doing things such as running errands or babysitting children out of school.

The effort is being organized by members of the Queen’s University Aesculapian Society, which is a medical students group that has existed since 1872 and is dedicated to fostering a vibrant community in the school of medicine.

This week’s initiative started with just five members of the Aesculapian Society who were inspired to begin organizing a volunteer group to assist front-line medical staff in Kingston after seeing social media posts of similar efforts at another school.

“We found out about it on Twitter, and it also caught the attention of some of our classmates … so we decided to begin working on our own implementation of the initiative,” Shikha Patel, the society’s communications officer, said.

“As medical students, we have a rudimentary understanding of infectious disease, and we know how serious it is. We also appreciate the work that people are doing on the front lines. We’ve been released from our own clinical duties, so we wanted to give back.”

Organizers put out a call for volunteers over social media and put up an online signup form, and within a few days more than 30 medical, nursing and dentistry students came forward to help out.

#Kingston #YGK Healthcare providers: Queen's medical students are volunteering to help those on the front lines with errands, childcare, pet care & more! Sign up here if we can lend you a hand: https://t.co/J3eDCfOtWI. Please share/ RT! @QueensUGME @QueensUHealth@KingstonHSC — Queen's Medicine Aesculapian Society (@QMed_AS) March 16, 2020

The response from medical staff in Kingston was also impressive, with more than 40 requests for assistance.

“Childcare was the overwhelming majority of requests, particularly for children aged three and under now that daycares have close,” Patel explained. “We’ve also had a few requests for pet care, and running errands such as grocery runs.”

The students are being careful in how they provide services that medical staff have been looking for. In order not to facilitate the spread of the virus, each volunteer is paired up to help just one family, especially when it comes to babysitting.

They are still looking for more volunteers to sign up so they can be paired with other front-line medical staff in need of support outside the hospitals.

The assistance the students are providing is much appreciated by administrators at the Kingston Health Sciences Centre. Chief of staff Dr. Michael Fitzpatrick said it is making a real difference.

“We are extremely grateful to the Queen’s medical students who have stepped up to lend a helping hand to our hard-working front-line staff,” Fitzpatrick said. “Your generosity of spirit and your dedication to helping colleagues in a really pragmatic way will not only help us better manage pandemic COVID-19 at KHSC, but has made our students an invaluable part of the health-care effort and has raised the spirits of all at KHSC.”

Similar volunteer groups are beginning to organize on social media in other sectors of the Kingston community for people who are eager to do something to help as well.

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