Everyone, Everyday. Relentlessly: Meet Nicole Patel

As we update our brand name to UMass Memorial Health and launch a new brand campaign, it’s time to tell the world who we are, what we do and what we stand for as a health system. Our relentless caregivers are the inspiration for the update of our new brand name and campaign. Find out more about these caregivers and how it takes everyone, every day working together relentlessly to care for our patients and each other. This week, we interviewed Nicole Patel who shared her thoughts with us on everything from teamwork to how she found community in the pandemic.

In March of 2020, the world slowed down and watched as health care professionals stepped up to lead the way forward. In every department across UMass Memorial Health, change was underway. Every caregiver was taking on new responsibilities, adapting to new CDC requirements and monitoring the ever-changing state of our community. In our Core Chemistry Lab, Nicole Patel, Medical Technologist II, was busy doing her part and ready to do more.

As caregivers from lab departments across the system came together to form the Molecular Virology Lab, Nicole felt called to join. She and other volunteers worked around the clock to keep up with a growing need for testing. “It was very impressive to me how resilient you can be,” Nicole recalled about those first few weeks. It is this resiliency and dedication to her work that was essential to managing COVID-19 cases and ultimately keeping numbers down in Worcester and beyond.

“When I hired Nicole five years ago, it didn’t take long for me to see she would be an asset to our department,” said Theresa Fontes, Nicole’s manager. “She’s adaptable and always willing to try something new. Her dedication and hard work are so valuable to our team, and she is greatly appreciated.”

As her department returned to normal operations, Nicole noticed an improvement in her and her team’s efficiency. The pandemic was having a positive effect on her team’s productivity. “It opened up doors in ways of working,” Nicole recalled. This progress, despite the difficulty COVID-19 brought, could not have happened without the strong team foundation the lab team works hard to cultivate every day.

From setting up a COVID-19 testing lab out of a converted storage room in one week to helping run that lab to deliver critical diagnoses, Nicole did everything she could and more to help throughout the pandemic. She worked in the Molecular Virology Lab for over a year, and there she witnessed our organization take on what she describes as “more of a team mentality.” In sum, Nicole echoed what many other caregivers have expressed throughout this crisis: We came together as an organization during COVID-19 – there is no doubt about that – but something equally as important happened. We came together as human beings who needed one another’s support during an incredibly challenging time.