Dr. Handy’s Corner

Dr. Handy’s Corner

September 2024

In this video, Dr. Lori Handy recounts a family’s experience with influenza. She also discusses influenza and COVID-19 since she gets questions about the need for these vaccines during childhood, describing the symptoms of each disease and the value each of these vaccines offer. 

Watch the video.

About Dr. Handy

Dr. Handy knew at a young age that she wanted to be a doctor. Her passion for helping people, particularly kids, lead healthy lives compelled her to specialize in pediatric infectious diseases. “I decided on pediatrics because I love to see the joy of kids, particularly if they were sick and needed help getting better. Once they left the hospital, they were often back to themselves. And that was also one of the reasons I chose to be an infectious disease doctor,” said Dr. Handy.

  • Lori Handy, MD, MSCE: Hi, I'm Lori Handy. I'll be speaking to you on behalf of the Vaccine Education Center. 

    I decided to go to medical school long ago when I just thought that biology was incredibly interesting, and I knew that I wanted to work alongside patients and help them lead healthier lives. From there my journey was a little bit varied, and finally I decided on pediatrics because I love to see the joy of kids. 

    Children can get sick with all sorts of infections and it's our job to treat them and support them through it. But most of all, when I ended my training, I wanted to think about the ways that could prevent children from even being sick to begin with. There are so many ways to prevent infections, whether it's through vaccines, through thinking about keeping the healthcare setting clean, educating children and their parents on when or when not to use antibiotics. The topics are so broad, and being a pediatric infectious disease doctor has allowed me to do so many things over the years to really be best positioned to help them. 

    Infection prevention and control at the hospital is a program that works to help prevent children who are hospitalized for another reason from getting a new infection in the hospital. So, if they're coming in sick for something, whether it's a bone infection or surgery or something like a new cancer diagnosis, we want to make sure that they are taken care of for that problem, that they didn't get a new problem while they're under our care. So, we spend time thinking about how do we keep the environment safe. How do we make sure all of our employees know how to wash their hands. How do we make sure that their parents know how to wash their hands. How do we make sure that they understand what it is to stay healthy in the hospital. And we spend a lot of time educating children, educating their parents, educating our employees on the best ways to prevent infections. 

    There's a lot happening at a hospital behind the scenes that you don't even realize to help keep patients healthy. Our Department of Infection Prevention and Control works on anything from maintaining the air filtration, which is pretty complicated in a hospital, testing the water to make sure it's clean and appropriate for use, and designing programs so that we make sure only healthy individuals come into the hospital. This may mean sometimes we have to use limited visitation. We screen visitors when they come in. We want to make sure they're not bringing colds into the hospital that potentially would make our kids sick. 

    Sometimes we do certain things that really make your visit a little bit easier, which is making sure your room is always clean and tidy, ensuring that we're doing things like cleaning the floors, cleaning the showers, keeping all the germs out of the environment that could potentially make a child sick. 

    And the final thing we do is really work a lot on partnering with our patients and families so that they understand kind of the “why” behind our programs and they can partner with us on making sure that our teams can do all the right things to keep kids safe. 

    The thing I love the most about infectious diseases is that many infections are treatable, and it is really wonderful to be able to have a child who really wasn't feeling well and be able to help them get completely back to themselves. But really the other part of infectious diseases that I love is the prevention part, which is essentially trying to get ourselves out of business and say, how can we create enough vaccines or enough healthy habits so that we don't have to have kids come into the hospital at all. And that would be our dream to not really need our field anymore, but we're a long way off.
Transcript Transcript

"Health at Home with Dr. Handy" video series

In this Parents PACK video series, Dr. Handy shares practical advice on how to keep children and families healthy. Check back often as more videos will be added. The video series can also be accessed through a YouTube playlist.

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