Heroes of West Texas Spotlight: Alexandra Bates

Alexandra Bates: Family Nurse Practitioner

Alexandra has been with Covenant Health since 2015 as an emergency department nurse and has been a family nurse practitioner for the past two years.

“The most challenging part of the pandemic was dealing with the constant new education and changes. We were trying to stay up to date on best practices and precautions to take while getting new information every single day. Things were just changing so quickly, at first, we were told to look for cough, congestion, fever, and chills. Suddenly it became, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea.

There's a lot of fear in the community. Everyone was asking us a lot of questions, and this is one of the first times in my career that we've had to say, “we don't know.” We don't. We can't give you an exact answer because it's so new and we don't have the data on how long it's going to last or long-term effects.

I’m proud of my coworkers and our emergency department as a whole. We stepped up to the challenge. Everyone took it in stride everyone worked together really well. We converted part of my office into a COVID area. The doctors took on a lot of responsibility at first because we didn't know much about it, so they were seeing, almost all the COVID patients. As we progressed, we found what the nurse practitioners could do and what the doctors could do. Everyone figured it out and we worked well together so it was nice. Just being here and being part of a good working team and I just feel kind of blessed to be working here at Covenant.”