Martin County Quiet Heroes: People Providing Protection
Dr. Steven Parr snaps a photo of the face shield made by the Palm City company, Avant-Garde.
Dr. Parr and others procure and provide equipment, protecting front line heroes from Covid-19
The doctor pulled up behind the Harbor Freight store with his Ford pick up truck, pulling a flatbed trailer. He hopped out in his scrubs, as a forklift operator zipped out of the warehouse with pallets of boxes to load onto the trailer. Once they were loaded she smiled, waved goodbye and headed back through the garage door. The doctor said, “Thank you!"
“Let’s see what we have here,” he said as he climbed up on the flatbed, looking at the boxes to see what the contents might be. Words on the outside told him the boxes contained nitrile gloves, small, medium and large. And then he spotted a box of 60 protective face shields. “These are great!” he said, with his slight Southern drawl.
Dr. Steven Parr, who is the director of emergency medicine for the Cleveland Clinic Martin Health System, usually spends his working hours overseeing the emergency rooms of the company’s hospitals along with taking care of a full load of patients. However, in the last few weeks, he has been pursuing Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), in anticipation of a large caseload of coronavirus cases on the Treasure Coast.
“We have to be able to continue to do our job,” Dr. Parr said. “For us, even doing a physical exam on someone with chest pain, shortness of breath, cough, fever, wheezing--they may have respiratory disease. Since it could be any virus, we are trying to wear them for every patient,” he said. “We still need to be protected when people are clearly sick or with those showing no symptoms.”
“The community is helping the health system absorb the Covid-19 crisis,” Dr. Parr said. “That’s what’s special about it--all these people are stepping in and trying to help. Everybody is concerned because if it gets bad, we know we are going to run out of stuff.”
Avant-Garde Designs owner Jeremy Carlson talks to Dr. Parr about the fit of the face visors they have designed and are now producing at their Palm City facility.
Avant-Garde Designs, a Palm City company known for their custom car interiors, has shifted to using their lasers and 3D printers to create face shields. Owner Jeremy Carlson and a group of friends in his industry got together to work on a face shield design. (Read a People Magazine article about his friend’s business in Boston making and donating face shields.)
“Once the design was finished, we decided to each make 500 and see where this goes. Now the design has been shared online and it has taken off,” he said.
“We are willing to do whatever we can to help Cleveland Clinic,” said Carlson. “The ER guys with their boots on the ground need this stuff.”
In addition to the visors, Avant-Garde is working on plexiglass intubation boxes that will shield medical doctors as they operate on patients, lowering the risk of being contaminated by the virus.
Avant-Garde is charging slightly more than time and materials, not looking to make a profit on these products.
“I want to keep my eight employees working. Right now we have four working on cars and four on face shields. We will move them all over to the medical supplies if needed.”
“We are getting big orders from all over the country, so we’ve made ourselves essential real quick,” Carlson said. “Where I’m from, we have kind of a midwest mentality. We just do whatever needs to be done.”
Dr. Parr shows the Tyvek coveralls donated by Bahama Boat Works.
For Dr. Parr, one connection has led to another in his pursuit for the gear that will keep his staff safe. As it became clear that the Treasure Coast wasn’t going to escape the coronavirus, pharmaceutical rep Jim Wood (with Bristol-Myer Squibb) asked Parr what he could do to help. “You’re a drug rep, so I don’t know that there’s anything you can do to help with this. What we need are masks and gowns,” Dr. Parr said. But Wood did find a way to help.
“When you think about people with a real positive attitude, you can put him at the top of the list. It’s a key attribute in the position that he is in,” Wood said about Dr. Parr. “He doesn’t have an agenda. He’s just a helper. He’s the kind of guy where there could be a bomb going off and he’s like ‘Hey Jim! How are you doing?’ So, when he told me, I said I’ve got to help him,” said Wood.
“I started thinking, where would I find something like this? I had a boat built last year and remembered they wear coveralls and masks, so I made a handful of calls.”
“With the boat builders, once I put a name and facility with it, they were on board,” Wood said. “Even if they didn’t have masks or anything, they had suggestions about who might be able to help.
His search led to Bahama Boat Works and Merritt Supply in Riviera Beach. Bahama Boat Works donated two cases of Tyvek coveralls and Merritt Supply gave Wood a deep discount on more coveralls plus donated boxes of disposable lab coats. Wood used some of his own money to pay the balance.
“It was one of those things that gives you faith in humanity,” Wood said. “These people really care about what the medical folks are going through right now.”
Dr. Parr commends those in the community who are sewing homemade masks right now. “I think it is absolutely wonderful,” he said. “Those masks help us to safely reuse what is not intended to be reused. If you have one of those homemade masks, they will filter out any droplets on the outside of the mask and significantly decrease your risk of accidentally getting Coronavirus on your hands when you take it off and put it back on. We are having to reuse stuff.”
Dr. Parr demonstrates his gratitude to Harbor Freight by making sure to grab a photo with their sign.
When Dr. Parr learned that Harbor Freight was donating all their inventory of 44 million pairs of nitrile gloves and hundreds of thousands of masks and face shields to hospitals in the 1,000 communities where their stores are located, he jumped to fill out their online application.
The company received an overwhelming number of requests, but Dr. Parr’s quick action helped secure the donation to our community. “The number of requests we received was overwhelming: over 13,000 applications from hospitals and more than 43,000 email recommendations from customers. I only wish we had enough PPE for every one of these hospitals and all of their courageous medical professionals caring for COVID-19 patients under the most difficult circumstances,” said Eric Smidt, owner of Harbor Freight, in a statement on the company’s website
“It’s really kind of Harbour Freight in general, amazing generosity,” said Dr. Parr. “We really need this equipment.”
Probably most doctors wouldn’t happen to have a flatbed trailer handy to pick up pallets of equipment in the middle of their workday. “It’s a guy thing,” said Parr, with an easygoing smile. “And I’m going to do anything that needs to be done. That’s kind of the whole emergency medicine thing. We want to do anything we can to avoid unnecessary problems so we can do our jobs.”
“I’ve treated several patients that tested positive. The reality is that we handle this stuff all day long. People come in with other infectious diseases like measles, mumps, tuberculosis. All that other stuff you don’t want. Yes it scares me, but without fear you can’t have courage.”
That’s the thing about heroes--they find a way in the face of fear.
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