Pediatric nurse Molissa Germscheid, a St. Peter native, is in New Orleans for Health Recovery Week.
A St. Peter native is among a team of 38 Mayo Clinic staff members in New Orleans helping in the city’s Health Recovery Week.
Molissa Germscheid is a pediatric nurse at Mayo’s St. Marys Hospital. She is a 2000 graduate of St. Peter High School and of the nursing program at Minnesota State University.
Along with hundreds of other medical personnel from other places and disciplines, the Mayo team will provide care to people in areas hardest hit by hurricane Katrina and the flooding that followed. In conjunction with Operation Blessing, Remote Area Medical, Mayo’s role is to provide specialty care in the areas of endocrinology, cardiology, hypertension and pulmonary medicine.
Many hospitals are still closed and about half the medical providers have not come back to the city, said Lee Aase, public relations officer at Mayo Clinic.
This is the second health recovery week; the last one was a year ago and 6,000 patients came through the tent city medical center. Aase said, “Our goal is to see 10,000 people this year.”
The problems are no longer disaster-related first aid.
“My specialty is pediatrics, but we also see a lot of diabetics on our floor at St. Marys,” Germscheid said. “We’re going to do health maintenance and prevention.”
Dentists and eye doctors will be available as well.
“You don’t fix diabetes in one office visit,” said Aase, so part of the team’s mission will be to establish records and connections for continuing care to serve patients appropriately and quickly on an ongoing basis.
With all that going on, will Germsheid get to see anything of New Orleans?
“Probably not,” she said. “I don’t think we’ll have time for any adventures.”
Nevertheless, she was thrilled to be going. “I don’t even know what to do,” said Germscheid a day before she flew to New Orleans, “I’m so excited.”
Germscheid has seen photos of where she’ll be staying in Slidell, La. “It looks like a big old community center with bunk beds. I guess when they went down initially they slept in tents, so this is way upscale from that.”
This is Germscheid’s second unusual nursing assignment in her short two-year nursing career. Her first was to be involved in the care of the conjoined Carlsen twins when they were separated in 2006.
Germscheid is the daughter of Jean and Jeff Germscheid of St. Peter.
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