Healthcare workers in the Pittsburgh region talk about faith and religion amid COVID-19. (Photos by Ryan Loew, Jay Manning and Nick Childers/PublicSource)
by Chris Hedlin
We’re about one year into the COVID pandemic, and healthcare workers have reason to be exhausted: upended routines and unexpected tragedies, patients without visitors and fears for their own families.
For healthcare workers who identify as people of faith, the challenges are physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. Their day-to-day work requires them to dig deep—to draw upon their faiths amid stress, grief and uncertainty.
To see this kind of resilient faith in action, PublicSource spoke with six Pittsburgh-area healthcare professionals from varying clinical settings and religious traditions. They shared stories of medicine and faith practiced together.
Dr. Tara Hyder
Internist, University of Pittsburgh Physicians
Dr. Tara Hyder outside her home in Collier Township. (Photo by Ryan Loew/PublicSource)
When COVID-19 hit, the urgent care clinic where Dr. Tara Hyder is a physician took an unanticipated frontline role.
Primary care clinics were in lockdown. Patients with normal cold symptoms were told not to go to their doctors. People with injuries were afraid to go to the emergency room. People who thought they had COVID were looking to be tested.
And so they came to urgent care.
Once the clinic had COVID-testing capabilities, they were seeing 60 to 80 patients in a 12-hour period and monitoring those who tested positive on top of that.
“It really was the most challenging period in my career so far,” Hyder said.
Hyder was no stranger to adversity. She survived the Gulf War growing up in Saudi Arabia and was a medical trainee in Toronto during the SARS 1 outbreak of 2003. But this felt different.
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Faith on the frontline: Healthcare workers share stories of spiritual strength amid COVID-19
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