Shelly Schwedhelm, MSN, RN, discussing development of the NBU

18 March 2022

Shelly Schwedhelm: It was an old bone marrow transplant unit that had been sort of set aside—a pediatric bone marrow transplant unit. And it had its own air-handling, so that was really a feature that made a lot of sense financially, so we were able to really operationalize it with limited capital and had some support to do that from the state of Nebraska, from those bioterrorism dollars. And then we literally functioned it for 10 years on a shoestring. We had some money from our state health department through hospital preparedness funds that was given to us, I think it was $20,000. [Laughs] And we exercised with our team every three months and most every exercise included personal protective equipment training. We did an exercise like twice a year and then I had a small part of an FTE that was supported to help write protocols, procedures, and the nurse you're going to interview is Kate Boulter, who sort of led on that and just kind of kept things moving for all that time. But we really, we didn't keep supplies on the shelf, we created just in time inventories. So if we literally needed to be activated, we could quickly, you know, within four to eight hours, be good to go.

From the McGoogan Health Sciences Library Special Collections and Archives