‘Health Care Heroes Wall’ Commemorates One-Year COVID Anniversary

By: Margarita Oksenkrug

On March 8, 2020, Lenox Hill Hospital cared for its first COVID-19 patient. One year later, its leadership and frontline heroes came together for a day of remembrance, healing and hope.

To acknowledge a year of tremendous loss and heartbreak, but also the amazing heroism and resilience of frontline workers, the hospital hosted a full day of events and activities as an opportunity for co-workers to gather and begin healing collectively.

The day began with the unveiling of the “Healthcare Heroes Wall,” a structure dedicated to honoring the lives lost, expressing gratitude to courageous health workers and sharing stories of resilience and hope. Hospital employees’ signatures envelop the words “Healthcare Heroes,” displayed in bold atop the wall. Below it sit dozens of photographs of the monumental events that shaped the past year. Those include evening clap outs, candlelight vigils and first staff vaccinations.

Charles Carpati, MD, and Linda Kirschenbaum, DO, were the first employees to receive the COVID vaccine at Lenox Hill. The married couple of 24 years not only treated hundreds of COVID-19 patients, they were instrumental in re-structuring the hospital to handle the coming wave of patients when COVID first hit New York.

Located in the Upper East Side hospital’s cafeteria, the display offers a timeline of events for frontline workers.

“Those images just brought me right back to March and April and May, right back to the clap outs, right back to the peak of the wave,” said Emily Fawcett, RN, a float nurse who become a source of inspiration for colleagues. “It took my breath away to be right back there 12 months later.”

In those first days of the pandemic, emergency department staff had no way of knowing what happened with patients sent up to other units. Hearing her friends’ pleas over late-night texts, she realized she could close that loop. On March 26, 2020 Ms. Fawcett initiated the first “Hope Huddle.”

“I saw those patients and wanted to share the good outcomes, those little stories of patients getting off ventilators, reuniting with their families after weeks of not seeing them,” she said.

Also unveiled during the event was an art installation featuring a thousand multi-colored origami cranes assembled into a vibrant rainbow symbolizing the range of emotions experienced during the pandemic – from grief to gratitude.

“The past year has changed who we are,” said Rabbi Simcha Silverman, director of spiritual services at Lenox Hill. “It has heightened our awareness of the fragility of life. It has strengthened the bonds of teammates and colleagues. Yes it has changed us, but it didn’t reduce us. It didn’t break us, but rather strengthened us.”

The March 8 ceremony included a rendition of “Here Comes the Sun” by the Beatles, the song that was played over the loudspeaker each time a COVID-19 patient was discharged from Lenox Hill during the height of the pandemic.

In the evening after sunset, Lenox Hill team members walked around the hospital holding up brightly lit phones, both in memory of those who have perished and as a sign of the light at the end of the tunnel. The walk was followed by heartfelt speeches from hospital leadership thanking the staff for their selfless service and by a reading of “The Miracle of Morning,” a poem by Amanda Gorman, the accomplished inaugural poet.

“It just was so powerful to see everybody want to help, everybody want to take part,” said Daniel Baker, MD, the hospital’s medical director. “Everybody always said ‘Yes.’ We didn’t experience this concern of ‘We won’t get the help we need,’ because everybody just came running and said, ‘What can we do?'”

Each employee received a medal of appreciation to memorialize the unprecedented challenges of the past year and to celebrate the incredible dedication of each team member. The Northwell-branded medal is engraved with the words “COVID-19 changed our world, together we fought back” on one side and “Here comes the sun and I say it’s alright” on the other. The design was inspired by the victory medals distributed after World War I to commemorate the end of the Great War.

Northwell Health’s two other Manhattan sites – Manhattan Eye, Ear & Throat Hospital (MEETH) and Lenox Health Greenwich Village (LHGV) – also commemorated the anniversary. At MEETH, staff created posters that were incorporated into an original art piece to be displayed at the facility’s public space, the Great Hall. Team members also participated in healing programs, including art therapy, a sound bath and group reflections with the hospital chaplain.

At LHGV, staff met on the rooftop for a remembrance ceremony led by leadership, featuring remarks from the executive director, Alex Hellinger, and chief nursing officer, Launette Woolforde, followed by an intimate lunch for the team.

The beginning of March marked the one-year anniversary of the first confirmed COVID-19 case in New York City. Since then, 30.5 million Americans have been diagnosed with the novel coronavirus and more than 550,000 people across the nation – nearly 50,000 of them New Yorkers – have died from the virus. Lenox Hill Hospital, MEETH and LHGV have treated almost 6,600 COVID-19 patients to date.

The development of the COVID-19 vaccines has been a major milestone in the effort to end this devastating pandemic. Northwell Health made history when it vaccinated the first people in the United States in December of 2020. Lenox Hill Hospital’s chairman of emergency medicine, Yves Duroseau, MD, was among them as the second person and the first doctor in the U.S. to get inoculated. The three Manhattan campuses have now performed more than 37,000 vaccinations and fully vaccinated nearly 14,000 people.