Telluride Med Ctr: Digging Deep to Maintain Covid-19 Response!

26 Oct Telluride Med Ctr: Digging Deep to Maintain Covid-19 Response!

Donate to the Telluride Med Center’s Covid-19 Fund here. With the pandemic surging everywhere and plans to temporarily relocate to respiration clinic at Telluride Science’s Depot building, now more than ever the Med Center needs your support.

Med Center staff, including Kathryn Beck BSN, RN, arrived to work early this morning to shovel a path for patients to the Outdoor Respiratory Clinic. Photo by Melissa Plantz.

The morning of October 26, nurses and doctors arrived early for their shifts to shovel out and clear a path for the patients who will be seen in the Outdoor Respiratory Clinic.

Throughout the pandemic staff have met patients with respiratory symptoms outside the facility in festival tents — or in one of two negative airflow rooms inside the medical center — in order to maintain the medical center facility for non-respiratory primary and emergency care services.

A longer term solution was announced last month to move the outdoor COVID-19 response efforts to the adjacent Telluride Depot building. Read the release here. 

At present the Depot Building, which the med center is calling the Interim Depot Clinic, is being retrofitted for temporary outpatient care.

Staff anticipate they’ll be able to relocate the COVID-19 response effort indoors, to the Telluride Depot, by Thanksgiving.

The initial cost of this temporary respiratory clinic is roughly $400,000, and while the med center expects grants will subsidize some of the cost, there will nonetheless be a substantial amount of money left to raise and ongoing monthly expenses to account for.

“This is a community challenge and the support we continue to receive from our community is profound,” said Kate Wadley, executive director of the Telluride Medical Center Foundation.

To date that outpouring has included donations of equipment, protective gear, lunch and snacks for staff, an anonymous donation of just over 100K, a 50k pledge from the Telluride Women Give philanthropic group, 10K from Two Skirts, and thousands of other donations at all levels from the community.

“It’s not ideal but the fact remains that our current facility is ill-equipped to meet the needs of this pandemic,” said Karen Winkelmann, CEO of the medical center. “And while there’s fair cause for optimism for the potential site of a new facility at Society Turn sometime in the next five years, today and for the foreseeable future, we’re in the position to ask for an unprecedented amount of support.”

“Every dollar will be spent to ensure the safety and health of the community and our incredibly hardworking team on the frontline of this global pandemic,” said Wadley.