Lexington, Ky. (March 6, 2025) – Five years have passed since the Covid-19 pandemic officially arrived in the Commonwealth, but on Friday, March 6, 2020, Gov. Andy Beshear confirmed the state of emergency in Kentucky, confirming the state of first positive Covid-19 cases. And the first case was tested and diagnosed at the University of Kentucky Albert B. Chandler Hospital.
The day began a long-standing grind for health professionals from states, countries and around the world. The hospital system struggled to keep up with the surge in severely ill patients coming through the door. The shortage of personal protective equipment, artificialists, ECMO machines, hospitalized beds, and even healthcare providers themselves, has led to a kind of global health crisis that has not been seen in more than a century.
This episode of “Behind the Blue” reflects how eight long-time employees on the health side of UK campuses have influenced their professional and personal lives, from managers to frontline healthcare providers to researchers, and how they influenced lessons learned to key moments in history. The full transcript for this episode is available here.
Panelists in this oral history of the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK and the Commonwealth:
Jenn Alonso has been in UK healthcare for 13 years and has been working as a registered nurse in the Medical Intensive Care Unit (MICU) since 2014. As a MICU nurse, she works with a team of doctors, nurses, therapists and other providers to care for some of the most critically ill patients who come to healthcare in the UK. Alonso worked at Micu the day the UK's first Covid-19 patient was hospitalized.
DNP's Kim Blanton is the chief nursing officer at Albert B. Chandler Hospital in the UK. Blanton began her UK nursing career in 1998 with a neurotrauma ICU, working as a rapid response nursing, division-charge nurse, and managing cardiovascular step-down units, rose through several nursing positions. After temporarily leaving the UK to help create and operate ICUs at a local rural hospital, she returned as a hospital operation manager in 2011 before becoming UK Medical Enterprise Enterprise Enterprise (IPAC) and Medical Enterprise Director for Quality and Safety.
Blanton was playing an IPAC role when the Covid-19 pandemic began and helped Britain respond to Covid-19. She was called Covid-19 patients to help UK students, known as Covid-19 patients, develop plans and processes, including patient sage and PPE needs.
Kevin Hutton, MD, PhD, is Chief Medical Officer at Albert B. Chandler Hospital in the UK. A training anesthesiologist, he earned both a medical degree and a PhD in philosophy in the UK. Including residency time, Hutton has worked in UK healthcare for 21 years and has played a variety of leadership roles in anesthesiology in critical care medicine, primarily for neurology and cardiovascular subjects. When the pandemic began, he was Senior Medical Director of Critical Care Services and Interim Director of ECMO Services. Initially, Hatton's role focused on training and preparation of anesthesia critical care teams to provide care for non-covid ICU patients.
The best form of life support, ECMO is a machine that takes over the function of a patient's damaged heart and/or lungs by removing a patient's blood, oxygenating it, and returning it to the body. Although ECMO is used daily in UK healthcare, its use has skyrocketed during the pandemic as patients with severe lung damage caused by the virus needed this best life support. As interim director of ECMO services, Hatton and his team had to quickly develop protocols and processes to help as many patients as possible, using a limited number of ECMO machines.
Ashley Montgomery-Yates, MD, has been a doctor in the UK's School of Lung, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine since 2013. As a critical care physician, she works in a MICU environment, which primarily cares for sick patients. In 2013, she launched ICU Recovery Clinic in Healthcare in the UK. This helps patients who participate in the ICU navigate the follow-up care and resources needed to recover. At the time, the UK healthcare ICU recovery clinic was just one of three in the country.
Montgomery-Yates is currently the Senior Vice Chair of the Department of Internal Medicine. When the pandemic began, she recently became interim chief medical officer for inpatients and emergency services. As a doctor in this role and ICU, Montgomery – and her colleagues were deeply involved in the daily care of Covid-19 hospitalized patients. She is part of the team that successfully made the UK masses Covid-19 vaccine clinic at Kroger Field, and the ICU team also helped guide the creation of a brand new UK healthcare brand new Micus, which opened in January 2024.
Meg Pyper is a departmental billing nurse at the Albert B. Chandler Hospital Erginement Department in the UK and has been involved in medical emergency medicine in the UK since 2010. Her role is like air traffic control in ED. Get calls from EMS and local hospitals to determine which services the patient needs when they arrive when they arrive when they arrive. As a nurse, she was drawn to emergency care after seeing her favorite nurse mentor become “chaotic calm.” Piper began in this role a few weeks before the pandemic arrived in Kentucky, and she and her team were the first covid patients in care they received when they arrived at Chandler Hospital in the UK.
Lindsay Ragsdale, Maryland, is Chief Medical Officer at Kentucky Children's Hospital and Chief of the Department of Pediatric Palliative Care. Since arriving in the UK in 2013, she has worked to build a robust programme that supports critical young patients and their families by looking at physical, mental, emotional and mental well-being and helping them navigate the experiences of critical illness, and by holistic care for serious young patients and their families.
Ragsdale became KCH CMO in 2021. She helped set up both a pediatric monoclonal antibody clinic that offers infusions that help protect high-risk pediatric patients, and a successful pediatric vaccine clinic that provides COVID-19 vaccines to children in playful and attractive settings.
Rob Sprang is the director of British telecare, which has been held in the UK since 1996. UK began using Telehealth Services in 1995. Since then, Telehealth has grown dramatically, but its use has skyrocketed during the pandemic. Although initial telehealth facilities typically took place from facilities to facilities, telehealth could explode in popularity due to the widespread acceptance of telehals, which has significantly improved technology, and the new, more relaxed regulatory laws regarding its use.
When the pandemic hit Kentucky, Sprung and his team set up a UK healthcare clinic to provide telehealth, working 24/7 for over a week, along with countless outpatient providers and staff, to help patients see their providers without having to go to hospitals or clinics. Telehealth has been a key element that helped protect both patients and providers from potential exposure to Covid-19.
Dr. Vince Bendit is an associate professor of pharmaceutical science at the UK Pharmaceutical Dispensary with a background in chemistry, drug delivery and vaccine development. Early in the pandemic, his research in blood analysis – looking for biomarkers of cardiovascular disease in up to 1,500 samples at a time – was adapted to perform mass testing of co-vid antibodies as a diagnostic tool. His work shifted once again after PCR testing became the gold standard for diagnosing illnesses. This time, we will be working with local pharmacies to monitor communities in Kentucky communities.
After Covid, the project has evolved to include other infectious diseases and inflammatory conditions, focusing on increasing access to healthcare through a network of Kentucky pharmacies. There is also a new name: Opportunities for pharmacy-based adoption to enhance community testing and surveillance (protection). Venditto is Brooke Hudspeth, Pharm.D., associate professor of pharmacy practice and science. and co-oversees the project.
Venditto is also part of a consortium to understand and reduce infections in Kentucky (Cure-Ky). This encourages interdisciplinary cooperation to address the federal and subsequent infectious disease burden. The consortium was built shortly after the UK's Covid-19 Unified Research Expert (Cure) Alliance.
About “Behind the Blue”
“Behind the Blue” is available through a variety of podcast providers, including iTunes and Spotify. Become a subscriber to receive new episodes of “Behind the Blue” every week. The UK's latest medical breakthroughs, research, artists and writers will be featured along with the most important news that will affect the university.
“Behind the Blue” is a joint production between the University of Kentucky and UK healthcare. You can download the transcripts for this or other episodes of “Behind the Blue” from the show's blog page.
To discover how the University of Kentucky is moving forward with our Commonwealth, click here.
