Aaron Epstein, MD, worked on the fight against terrorism and national security. Now a third-year surgery resident at the UB, he leads a foreign medical project organization that is helping to fight COVID-19 in the United States (Credit: Meredith Forrest Kulwicki/ University of Buffalo)
Release date: July 15, 2020
BUFFALO, N.Y. – The Global Medical and Surgical Support Group (GSMSG) is sending trained physicians in the U.S. To conflict zones to treat patients in places like Iraq and Syria and provide medical care and when local fitness systems are overwhelmed.
This year, the organization, founded through a surgical resident of the University of Buffalo who in the past worked on national security and counter-terrorism, also operates in the United States, building cell clinics to help combat the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the past, the organization was deployed on the U.S. continent. In reaction to hurricanes that hit Florida, but expanded its national operations earlier this year when the COVID-19 pandemic began to accumulate in the New York area.
Aaron Epstein, MD, is a third-year surgery resident at the UB who founded GSMSG in 2014 as a student at Georgetown University and is now president.
PHOTO: http://www.buffalo.edu/news/releases/2020/07/013.html
When new York City’s fitness care formula was flooded with COVID-19 patients, Epstein was contacted through retired U.S. Army Colonel Robert Mabry, MD, who in the past led elite U.S. special operations medical teams. The application involved staff at Ryan Larkin Field Hospital in northern Manhattan, a facility run by U.S. Army Colonel Missy Givens, MD and U.S. Army Sick Doctor Kate Kemplin.
“An herbal bond”
According to Epstein, many doctors and other exercise professionals volunteering with the GSMSG have a military or defense record. “It’s an herbal connection,” he said.
“I entered the call for my entire mailing list for a few thousand people,” Epstein said. “I think we had 150 jobs to fill and they gave us about 800 answers. So we had to turn down other people for the New York site, however, there was still a national staffing need. Team members asked, “What can we do? Do? “Then we asked them to worry in their communities and start recruiting staff.”
The organization sent resources, doctors and nurses to foreign locations, adding the small Caribbean island of St. Martin, where members of the gsmSG team helped provide an impromptu intensive care unit. Epstein noted that many hospitals in small island countries, as well as many emerging countries around the world, do not have services such as ICU, which are located in more industrialized countries.
Now, with COVID-19 cases surging in the U.S. throughout the South and the West, the organization is mobilizing where the need is greatest. After GSMSG team members mobilized in New York City, they were contacted by HHI Corp., an engineering and construction company that is building mobile triage units during the pandemic.
Urgent need in Miami
“They saw what we did with staffing in New York and were interested in giving us a cellular triage unit, a mini clinic found in seven semi-trailers,” Epstein said. “My first concept was that we deserved to move him to Buffalo, but at that time, in mid-May, the number of patients with COVID-19 was well above the peak, so we contacted our network to see where there was still a pressing need. The other people in Miami were just beginning to see the spread of this pandemic wave, so we made the decision that it would be a smart position to create a clinic.
Currently under structure at HHI’s Utah headquarters, the cell clinic is expected to be completed later this summer. At this point, the unit will be sent to Miami and incorporated into the Jackson Health System for the remedy of COVID-19 patients for triage. GSMSG volunteers will help establish and administer the clinic.
As a South Florida location, this task is critical for Epstein. “Miami and the Jackson Healthcare System are a primary physical care center for South Florida,” Epstein said. “But the region is also a primary access point for foreign medical and surgical patients from Central and South America, as well as the Caribbean islands. The recruitment domain covered by this formula is really large and will allow us to have an effect far beyond the borders of this country.
Surgical in Buffalo
As a native Floridian, Epstein gets the usual question from Western New Yorkers, which is some variation of why on earth did he pick Buffalo for residency? Steven Schwaitzberg, MD, professor and chair of the UB Department of Surgery and president of UBMD Surgery, is a big part of that answer.
Like all fourth-grade medical students, Epstein had had many interviews, adding in some of the most productive hospitals in the country. At the time, he attended a convention on army surgery with his mentor, Colonel Rob Lim, an associate professor of surgery at Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu. Lim took him to Schwaitzberg, who had mentored Lim as a resident.
“Dr. Schwaitzberg is an incredibly inspiring guy,” Epstein said. “I talked to a lot of program managers and presidents, I tried to sell more to them, but with Schwaitzberg, it was more like he was looking for me to come here. He himself is a great power. It was a very different approach. “I learned I’d rather go where they need me.”
As a resident, Epstein and his colleagues in the program have been on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic, treating patients at Buffalo General Medical Center.
“It’s an intense moment,” Epstein says. “While we never had to mobilize our comprehensive contingency plans, we did everything we could to help.” And while those difficult days are something from the afterlife (hopefully for the better), Epstein points out that the classes will last forever, especially the sense of the whole team in surgery, medicine, anesthesia and other specialties, as well as nursing, all running together.
“I think it has given surgeons and the wider network a greater appreciation of all members of the medical profession, especially nursing. I used to be an emergency paramedic with a chimney branch and I was inspired by the nurses and emergency branch staff who would be entrusted to our patients, however, the total COVID-19 crisis opened everyone’s eyes to what nurses and aid staff are doing.
“Look at the nurses who are the front-line forces in the opposite combat to COVID-19,” Epstein said. “How many other people in the rest of the net paintings would still show up for the paintings knowing that the maximum will probably kill them? I think the country in general understands more fully that these other people will come to the paintings, even if it is possible to simply kill them. They’ll put your fitness before theirs. They’re willing to die for you.
Ellen Goldbaum News Content Manager Medicine Tel: 716-645-4605 [email protected] Twitter: @UBmednews
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