Tanya Roman was presented with the Friends of Nursing Award by Boston Medical Center [BMC]. The award recognizes and promotes excellence in nursing practice, nursing education, and nursing research.
The award was presented at BMC’s 21st Annual Nursing Excellence Awards last week.
Roman, 31, of Worcester, works in Central Processing at Boston Medical Center as a Processing Quality and Compliance Educator. She described to ThisWeekinWorcester.com how she led her team to reprocess thousands of high-demand N95 respirators during the surge of coronavirus.
“We were getting short on the inventory that we had,” Roman said. “There was a shortage in the nation and even in the world. But we created a process where we were able to get up to 18,000 masks stored and ready to go for our nurses.”
Roman says the ability to achieve such success was a national effort. She said, “It was a really big project nationally and individually. Everyone was trying to figure things out. For a good two or three months there was a big shortage of N95s in the nation and in the world. During that time period, we were able to figure out what we had in inventory, and also find different ways that we could possibly reprocess those masks, which means to completely kill COVID off of your mask and clean it so you could reuse it.”
Roman said BMC tried different methods, including UV lighting, gas plasma and dry steam used with concentrated hydrogen peroxide.
Roman shares the honor with Arnaldo Rivera, who also received the Friends of Nursing Award. The awards were presented by Nancy Gaden, Boston Medical Senior Vice President, Drew DiPietro Director of Sterile Processing, and Connie Schmidt of BMCs Center for Infection Prevention and Control.
“Being new here to the hospital, I couldn’t believe that I would get these two incredibly knowledgeable, gifted, talented, dedicated people to work with me,” Schmidt said. “However, as time went on and the work got really tough, these two [Roman and Rivera] hung in there and were ready to roll up their sleeves, advise, work, and pull together a team in order to provide the nursing staff as well as other staff here adequate PPE in the form of N95 respirators. They were the backbone.”
Roman and Rivera were presented with the award on Thursday, August 13.
Lead photo: Tanya Roman (left) alongside Boston Medical Center SVP, Nancy Gaden (right)/ credit Erlyin Ordinario of Boston Medical Center
