TNA’s Cindy Zolnierek: Covid is Threatening the “Whole Infrastructure for Providing Healthcare”

The Texas Nurses Association (TNA) has a rich history of accomplishments and has played a key role in setting educational and workplace standards for nurses in the state. Today, the TNA is still tirelessly advocating for nurses and patients in Texas. As the state struggles with a frightening surge of Covid-19 cases, DailyNurse asked Cindy Zolnierek, PhD, RN, CAE, CEO of the TNA, about the most pressing healthcare issues in America’s second largest state. In Part One of this two-part interview, Zolniek spoke about the challenges of fighting Covid-19 in Texas. (Part Two will publish tomorrow.)

DailyNurse: Some aspects of Texas geography must present serious healthcare challenges even in the absence of a major public health crisis.

Cindy Zolnierek: “We do have these great expanses, and they tend to rely on critical access hospitals. [Critical access] hospitals take care of basic emergencies, but they’re very used to shifting patients off to larger facilities and other communities. This has long been standard practice in the areas of the state that have those largest expanses like West Texas. After you leave that El Paso, you go a long ways before you hit another decent sized city. [It’s] the same with Amarillo and Lubbock, Laredo, and the Midland Odessa area, which are some of the hardest hit areas [by Covid-19] in Texas. And now, with those hospitals being full, overflowing with patients to critical access, hospitals are left with no place to send their patients to. So it’s not just the communities themselves that are impacted—it’s the whole system, the whole infrastructure for providing health care, and care for cases like strokes and heart attacks and highway accidents is being impacted significantly.”

DN: So the whole healthcare system is being placed under severe strain during the pandemic?

Zolnierek: “Well, [normally] patients go to the nearest facility, like a critical access hospital, which patches them up, does the assessment and anything you need to do for life-saving. They then send the patient to a trauma facility. [During the pandemic] the problem has been. . . Click here to read the rest of this article.

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Koren Thomas

Associate Editor at DailyNurse

Koren Thomas (pictured with Assistant) was the associate editor of DailyNurse from late 2019 through July, 2022—and she was not joking about the "issue postage stamps saluting US nurses" idea. Send your article ideas, submissions, Nurse of the Week suggestions, comments, and corrections to the current Editor in Chief at [email protected].