Jamie Fortune, SLCC Courier (l-r), Jordan Young, Technician Healing Arts Lab, Tara Haight, Associate Dean Division of Nursing
As classrooms and labs amid the halls of Salt Lake Community College’s Health Sciences building emptied in March to help stop spread of COVID-19, administrators and faculty members saw an opportunity to use idled resources to help others in the community.
With coordination help from Assistant Utah Attorney General Steve Gordon, SLCC was able to donate supplies to hospitals in the community. The surgical technology, medical assisting and nursing programs at SLCC banded together to donate valuable personal protective equipment (PPE) like gowns, masks and boxes of gloves.
A member of the college’s Respiratory Therapy Program Advisory Committee saw a need at the University of Utah Hospital for more ventilators, and SLCC’s School of Health Sciences loaned three of its own. SLCC’s ventilators are normally used in its Healing Arts Labs for instruction of students.
“Thank you to everyone who has played a part in making this happen,” Tara Haight, associate dean of SLCC’s Nursing Division, told those involved in pulling together all of the equipment and delivering it in early April. “We should be proud as a SLCC community that we are able to contribute to the battle against COVID-19. I have no doubt that these three ventilators will save multiple lives that otherwise may have been lost.”