School of Nursing alumna Sheila Davis, DNP ’08, MSN ’97, is among the health care leaders involved with the Massachusetts COVID-19 Community Tracing Collaborative, designed to flatten the COVID-19 curve to more rapidly reduce the number of cases in Massachusetts.
The nonprofit Partners In Health (PIH), of which Dr. Davis is CEO, will coordinate closely with the MA COVID-19 Command Center, Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector Authority, and Massachusetts Department of Public Health to support Governor Charlie Baker’s efforts by training and deploying hundreds of contact tracers, who will call people that have been in close contact with confirmed COVID-19 patients.
“We are living in a difficult and unprecedented time, and it is imperative that all of us in the Commonwealth contribute to controlling this epidemic,” said Davis. “We’re humbled to be part of the team selected by Governor Baker to fight COVID-19 and hope that PIH’s experience fighting pandemics around the world will help stem the grim tide of the COVID-19 epidemic in Massachusetts.”
Davis, the first nurse to lead PIH, recently discussed other actions PIH is taking around the world to slow the spread of COVID-19.
“Our goal is to strengthen health systems, and we’ve been doing that for 35 years,” Davis said in a recorded interview. “It’s often at times like this, from the post-earthquake, post-cholera, Ebola, and now COVID, where it’s pretty evident that places in the world that are more vulnerable and don’t have strong health systems suffer the most and have the worst outcomes.
“We refuse to accept that, and, in addition to taking this on, we’re still delivering thousands of babies a day and still doing surgeries, still doing all of our regular work. So people are doing double or triple-time to make sure we get our sites as ready as possible.”
Davis is no newcomer to combating a deadly virus in an under-resourced health care system: She was on the front lines in her previous role as PIH’s Chief of Ebola Response. When she was interviewed in 2015 on the Ebola crisis, she gave a stark, prescient warning: “The world needs better health systems and universal health care. There is no money to be saved by not investing, because that will only lead to more deadly and expensive health crises.”