For hospital workers, leaving a shift in the emergency room and ICU doesn’t mean the day’s stresses are at an end. Many workers are going home and worrying about infecting their healthy family members, or paying for hotel rooms at great expense. A Facebook group called RVs 4 MDs is trying to make life easier for them by matching unused RVs with hospital workers, so they can self-isolate safely.
Photo: Mark Pavey/RVs 4 MDs To Fight the Corona Virus/Facebook
This Facebook Group Is Helping Medical Workers Self-Isolate by Matching Them With Unused RVs
The Facebook group, which was created on March 24, already has almost 21,000 members. It’s proven effective in matching RV owners with idle vehicles to hospital workers in dire need of a space to social distance. It began when Emily Phillips, a mom of three, posted on her own Facebook page asking if anyone had an RV for her husband, an ER doctor in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. A woman named Holly Haggard offered her RV, and now the family is resting much easier at night.
“Before the RV,” she said to CNN, “I was a nervous wreck. Every time my husband walked in the door or put his hand on something, I thought we were going to get (Covid-19), including my baby. But now that he’s in that RV, I’m back to my life, focused on my full-time job and my kids, and it’s completely changed our situation.”
Now, the two women are business partners aiming to pair up as many RV owners and healthcare workers as possible.
Mark Quale, an ER physician in Burlington, North Carolina, is also taking advantage of the program, and couldn’t be more grateful. “(RVs 4 MDs) demonstrates that there is so much more to fighting the coronavirus than what happens at the hospital,” he said. “There are layers upon layers of people fighting this in different ways. The reason I’m able to fight this right now is because of my wife [now a volunteer for the Facebook group] and the work that these people are doing so we can focus on the medical portion and not have to worry about the rest.”
If you have an RV that’s sitting idle and would like to donate it to a medical worker in need, simply visit the Facebook page. 