The Pandemic Pivot

I haven't seen a more descriptive picture of how these times can feel than this one of Elizabeth's daughter Ellis celebrating her solo Corona Prom.

I started as Executive Director of the Foundation days after the Safer at Home order. I had taken the position excited to start thinking about how to expand our mission statewide for more impact and then COVID-19 hit. All of a sudden our mission to advance the health of the state and support medical education looked different than simply expanding our grants and scholarships. But what did it look like? Did we need to put plague masks on as well?

To figure this out Elizabeth, Lori and I spent some time talking to students, physicians and those who work with them. This is what surfaced as concerns:

•  Physicians were worried about their communities and their abilities to meet basic needs, such as food, housing and healthcare.
• Smaller practices faced more challenges, especially in rural areas where the virus hadn't hit but healthcare was shut down and in smaller urban settings where the virus was prevalent.
• PPE was an issue, especially for practices that weren't affiliated with larger systems, the need for PPE in some high risk community settings was also mentioned.
• Medical education was disrupted with first generation and underrepresented students facing the biggest challenges.

As we began to think about how we could help it was clear that we would be reinventing the wheel to help with basic needs in communities across the state. There are already many established organizations doing great work and we would encourage people to seek them out and support them.

We were also afraid that we just weren't in a position to provide meaningful help to smaller practices, except with PPE. Initially PPE also seemed like something that we just didn't have the connections and resources to distribute. Then the Wisconsin Medical  Society developed a partnership with other Societies across the country to purchase from Action PPE and we had a resource. The next piece of this puzzle was a collaboration with Mike Zhang, CEO of Fenrici Products. Mike had a GoFundMe effort to provide PPE across the state and raised nearly $20,000. Genr8tor, Wismed Assure and the Wisconsin Medical Society were all corporate sponsors of that effort. This partnership means that the Foundation will distribute PPE to practices across the state that need help, with an emphasis on smaller practices serving vulnerable populations.

We also had discussions with people in both of the state's medical schools who are working with students at this time. UW-SMPH is concerned because they have the most diverse class of M1's ever and the socioeconomic diversity means some students may face more challenges than others. At the MCW they are seeing funded summer opportunities dry up and their M1's and M2's do not get summer stipends. Both schools are happy to partner with us to distribute funds to students in need. Elizabeth is hearing a lot of concern from students as she works with them on scholarships and loans. Many are afraid they won't be able to pay their summer rent.

Now we need your help! To donate please go to Protect our Future and always feel free to reach out with any questions.

All my best,

Marje

Marje Murray
Executive Director
Wismed Foundation
marje.murray@wismed.org