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TOGETHER
Children’s Care Home Keeps Kids Virus-free
Through Diligence, Self-sacrifice
By Hailey Eber
typical day for nurse Jillian
A Coar at the Elizabeth
Seton Children’s Center, a
facility in Yonkers that offers
long-term care to medically
complex youth, involves
administering medications,
monitoring feeding tubes,
suctioning tracheostomies
and dressing wounds.
But since the facility had to stop allowing
visitors, even family, in March, Coar’s work now also includes
hosting tea parties and sing-alongs, giving hugs and cuddles to her young
charges and arranging FaceTime sessions for friends and family.
“We’re not just nurses now,” says Coar. “We’re standing [in] for the parents also.”
“We have to protect their emotional well-being as well as their health,” adds her colleague
Vanessa Andrews, director of child life, therapeutic recreation and volunteers. “It’s both hard and
heartbreaking, but it also drives us to keep going because it’s what these kids have.”
The center took early drastic steps to keep its children safe during the COVID-19 crisis, not
allowing visitors, requiring all staff to change into their scrubs on the premises and wear masks,
upping their already intensive cleaning and sanitation procedures. They also closed its school and
implemented social distancing between both staffers and patients. It’s been a great challenge, but
it’s paid off. To date, not one patient has contracted the virus, a stark anomaly among residentialcare
facilities.
“Our kids have never been so healthy,” says CEO Pat Tursi. She credits their success at keeping
the virus out of the center, in part, with their day-to-day vigilance in non-pandemic times.
“We have a wonderful
infection prevention program
year-round,” she says, noting
that they have a full-time
nurse dedicated to infection
prevention and regularly consult
with an infectious disease
doctor, Dr Natalie Neu at
Columbia University Medical
Center.
An outbreak at the center, which
is the largest pediatric nursing
facility in the country, would
prove particularly devastating.
(See Children’s Home Care on page 51)
50 Adviser a publication of LeadingAge New York | Summer 2020