Mapping Care Project: The History of Black Nurses in Chicago

COVID-19

“When decisions are made about staffing and how many nurses and what we need to take care of our patients, just like the COVID nurses with personal protective equipment…they were running out of it and using things again because nobody listened to them.”
– Joan Bundley



At the Bedside with COVID-19 Patients

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed and exacerbated ongoing crises in the U.S. healthcare system. Nurses have found themselves working in difficult and dangerous conditions, often without sufficient support or with overwhelming nurse-to-patient ratios.1

Askale Facey-Phillips graduated from nursing school during the Omicron surge of January 2022, and she went straight into working in an intensive care unit, which was full of patients sick with COVID-19, and the “name of the game was keeping them alive.” Many patients were close to her age (early 30's), and she noted that she was constantly thinking, “that could be me.”


She recalled one patient, a 50-year-old woman who was vaccinated and relatively healthy, but also immunocompromised because she'd received a liver transplant years earlier. Facey-Phillips got to know the patient over time, speaking with her and giving her husband, children, and parents frequent updates over the phone.

At a certain point, Facey-Phillips began to realize that the patient wouldn't survive. Facey-Phillips notes:

"It was hard seeing my patient decline from-- she was walking to the bathroom when I met her. So, it kind of bothered me that she wasn't able to beat it or it took her out. She shouldn't have gone out like this, in my mind. This is not how you want your children to remember you and to think that this all could be avoided. This all could be avoided. A lot of people died because of this virus, and it could have been avoided."

The challenges did not end when Facey-Phillips left the hospital because she constantly felt scared about passing the virus along to her mother or her elderly in-laws, one of whom is on dialysis.

Leading Hospitals During the Crisis



As nurses in hospital management, Fred Brown and Angelique Richard witnessed the pandemic from a different perspective. Shortly before the outbreak of COVID-19, Brown became the interim associate vice president in Rush Hospital’s operating room. With the shutdown, Brown found himself managing an unprecedented situation, as the operating room transitioned to only admitting emergency cases.

Brown helped to develop plans for opening hospital beds that were previously been used for routine surgeries for the flood of COVID-19 patients. Brown also spent a lot of time circulating in the hospital providing emotional support to staff, who were working hard with a lot of uncertainty. He often worked from six or seven in the morning until eight or nine at night with his leadership team, managing staffing concerns and contacting different vendors to get essential supplies.

As Rush Hospital’s Chief Nursing Officer, Angelique Richard helped to lead the incident command team, overseeing the hospital’s operations. She remembers that “at that time, nobody knew anything. It was a time of great fear. There was not a lot of knowledge at all about what was actually even happening to us, how to treat and care for patients and how to care for ourselves.”

Richard is proud of the hospital’s response to each of the COVID-19 surges. Hospital staff approached the crisis by focusing on the basics: “learning as much as we could, communicating as much as we could [to patients].” The hospital had to lean into many unknowns, not just about the virus, but about the financial realities of operating a hospital when most surgeries, which are the most profitable aspect of healthcare operations, were paused.

Brown explains that a big challenge was the shortage of healthcare workers to care for all the COVID-19 patients. This forced hospital staff to work nonstop with few breaks. He recalls his boss realizing that he had been working 30 days straight and forcing him take the afternoon off.

As someone with military experience, Brown notes that it was important to him to “lead from the front,” to use his power as someone in senior leadership to make sure his staff had what they needed, especially personal protective equipment (PPE). And yet, he notes, “That was a really hard time being a leader because it wasn’t enough. It never felt like you were giving staff enough.” He recalls joining the line of staff who would gather in the hallway when a patient passed away to honor the person as their body was transported to the hospital morgue.



He adds that the real heroes were the nurses and other staff who worked closely with COVID-19 patients. He worries that not enough hospital leadership stepped up to support frontline workers. He recalls an African American environmental services worker at Rush who died from COVID-19. As a middle-aged African American man himself, Brown felt very nervous because many of the sickest patients at Rush shared his demographics.

Angelique Richard also notes that people of color were being impacted by COVID-19 at three times the rate of white Chicagoans, and that this felt very significant at Rush, which serves many communities of color. “There was a lot of courage and a lot of resilience,” she says, “and a lot of reminders about the business, if you will, that we were in” working with underserved populations. Other hospitals reached out to Rush because of the hospital’s resources and expertise in supporting certain types of patients. “We mobilized a lot of people,” she recalls, including retired nurses who came back to work to support health education efforts.

Brown also speaks about how the intensity of the time created a sense of teamwork and collaboration in the hospital. This even allowed for some lighter moments. “We had apple pie on Fridays,” and he laughs: “I learned about Tiktok.”

Community Clinics in the Pandemic

Karelle Webb experienced the COVID-19 pandemic outside of the hospital, as the Associate Director of Infection Control and Clinical Education at Erie Family Health, a network of community health centers. She had begun the position just five months before COVID-19 and found herself suddenly in the most daunting professional challenge of her life.

Her first big project was tracking down testing supplies for clinic patients. Webb explains that in the beginning of the pandemic, the government was only able to provide hospitals with testing supplies, not outpatient settings like community clinics. Through a partnership established by the governor’s office, Webb and her team worked with a pharmaceutical company that provided them with testing kits and processed results. Webb developed the whole operation from scratch, including building a reporting system, training medical assistants on how to test correctly, and even figuring out which swabs to use in a time of massive medical supply shortages.

Webb also worked to help set up a team that would report positive test results to the state and ensure that high-risk patients received regular telehealth check-ins, as well as a COVID-19 care package sent to their home, with masks, thermometers, and other necessary medical supplies.

The beginning of the pandemic was almost all-consuming for Webb. She didn’t see her family for eight or nine months in person because she could not risk getting sick and needing to take off work. She is grateful that she had many supportive people in her life who were checking in on her, but she notes that she wished she had taken more time to take care of herself. “I feel like it could have helped me to do my job even better,” she says, “And that's something I'll take with me going forward because we are only as good as we are.”

“On Strike For Our Lives”: COVID-19 & Black Nurses in Unions



As the COVID-19 pandemic surged, many healthcare staff on the frontlines felt frustrated to be called “essential workers” without receiving the pay or benefits that would truly recognize their work. Unlicensed Black nursing staff, such as certified nursing assistants, have faced unique challenges, receiving low pay and minimal protection while often being the most exposed to COVID-19 due to the intimate care they are obligated to provide. Nurses and other healthcare staff have used unions and labor organizing to pressure employers who they believe often prioritize profits over patients.

In September 2020, around 800 nurses (represented by the Illinois Nurses Association (INA)) and 3,700 hospital staff (represented by Service Employers International Union (SEIU), Local 73) in the University of Illinois healthcare system went on strike during a breakdown in contract negotiations.

The nurses were focused on pushing the hospital to provide guarantees in their contract about limits on nurse-to-patient ratios and better access to personal protective equipment (PPE). Other hospital staff were demanding higher pay, better PPE, and improved staffing ratios in their own contracts so that staff would not have overwhelming workloads. The striking workers believed these improvements would benefit their patients, who deserved better.

The coordination between the INA and SEIU Local 73 to pursue collective modes of pressing for improved working conditions and better wages was a huge step towards nurses uniting with other healthcare workers like nursing assistants, medical technicians, and maintenance and dining staff, who are disproportionately Black and Latinx workers.2 These workers play a key role in the day-to-day operations of healthcare facilities but are often the bottom of the healthcare hierarchy and are minimally compensated for their work.3

The hospital’s management attempted to block the strike with a court order and then brought in workers from other states to replace the striking workers. Despite this attempt, the nurses remained on strike for a week, while other hospital staff continued to strike for ten days.

The strikes ended with the hospital system agreeing to increase wages, hire additional nurses, and provide a continuous supply of PPE.4

Dian Palmer, president of SEIU Local 73, a Black woman who began her career as a registered nurse, declared at the end of the strike that:

“I am so proud of the Black and Brown women who led this strike, who convinced their co-workers striking was worth the risk. They never gave up. They were out there at dawn every day demanding justice for essential workers. UIC called them heroes but their pay and benefits didn’t reflect that, but UIC now understands what it means to be essential.”5



The Vaccine


When the COVID-19 vaccines began to become available, many Black nurses found themselves taking on a new challenge: educating their patients and coordinating efficient mass vaccination programs.

Angelique Richard recalls that, “When we finally did get a vaccine, I remember feeling so responsible. This was like gold. Could it be a life-death kind of opportunity for people?”

A nurse leader at Rush created a vaccine clinic in one of the hospital’s lobbies. Nursing students, pharmacy students, medical students, and retired nurses ran much of the operation, vaccinating massive amounts of people. Nurse leaders at the hospital, after working long days, also volunteered to give vaccines at the clinic. Rush later ran a similar vaccine program in Austin, a Westside Chicago neighborhood.

“And I have to tell you,” Richard says, “you would think that people would be exhausted and grumpy and tired and all of those kinds of things. And we were tired, we were exhausted. But there was such joy in that.”

Very early on, Karelle Webb could tell that both staff and patients at her workplace were confused and unsure about the vaccines. Webb loves health education, and so she felt drawn to the work of educating people about the vaccines.
Webb and her team surveyed staff as vaccines were coming out and learned that only about 60 percent of staff were planning to get the shot. Many were worried about the vaccine’s safety.

“It was very clear,” Webb says, “that the messaging that we would do for our staff would impact the messaging for our patients, and we needed to do it right.”

Webb and her boss developed a presentation for a COVID-19 vaccine lunch, attended by hundreds of staff, where she talked through all the scientific details about the vaccine and why it was reasonable to believe it would be safe and effective. She also had many one-on-one conversations with staff, explaining the statistics and listening to their concerns. Within a few months, 75 percent of Erie staff got their first vaccine dose.

The organization used a very similar model when educating patients about the vaccine, creating opportunities for patients to ask questions and speak with their own primary care provider, who they felt like they could trust.



She remembers:

We had so much branding. We had beautiful COVID-19 vaccine fairs on weekends, all these hours to just give access to our patients. And it was just a raging success. We partnered with [the Chicago Department of Public Health] to do Protect Chicago Plus, where we vaccinated the Humboldt Park community. Thousands of, not even our own patients, just folks in the community - that was really successful. Folks loved that. We just committed to the mission of getting folks vaccinated. And I got to do a lot of presentations, which I loved, and I got to talk to people about the vaccine. And because Black is sometimes my second or third identifier, [Webb is a first-generation Jamaican American immigrant] I don't think I realized how meaningful it probably was that I was presenting this information, particularly the clinical part, in a way that folks can understand about clinical trials and the data.

She explains that in every presentation, she told people, “I'm not here to tell you to get this vaccine. I'm here to explain it to you so you can understand and then make a decision for yourself.”

Webb notes that, having spent her first five years in Jamaica where vaccines were widely accepted, she was surprised to see how hesitant many Black Chicagoans were about the vaccine. “To see people who look like me be so deeply distrustful really forced me to confront how much I still have to learn about the African American experience in this country, with why there is such a deep distrust in medical institutions,” she says. It is important, Webb expresses, to learn about the historical implications of medical racism in the U.S. that led to the current situation.

Her experiences have also shown her the power of communities receiving health education from healthcare workers who share their identities:

“I can say sometimes when I would go to presentations, especially with other organizations, I didn’t see my counterpart, who looked like me, kind of presenting the information in the way that I was. And that could be just from happenstance in terms of which organization I was presenting with or in that webinar with, but I would’ve liked to see more…in my particular space, in infection control, I feel like I would have liked to see more folks who look like me.”

Black health care workers were on the front lines of the Chicago COVID-19 response at all levels of care, from the essential custodial and dietary workers, to the nursing assistants, to the bedside nurses, to the top management of clinics and hospitals. In a moment when communities of color were disproportionately impacted, Black healthcare staff worked overtime to care for the sick and vaccinate their communities. They risked their health and income to fight for safer and more supportive working environments, allowing them to protect themselves and provide their patients the best care possible.





To hear more about the stories of the nurses on this page and others, please visit our Donelley Oral History Collection.

This page has paths:

This page references: