CLEVELAND — After the hardest year in the careers of many medical professionals, the NFL and Cleveland Browns are trying to reward multiple healthcare workers with a VIP experience at the NFL Draft.
What You Need To Know
- As many as 50,000 football fans are expected to come to downtown Cleveland to enjoy the NFL Draft events, but only a selected few will experience the draft right next to the draft stage
- Healthcare workers are among the few that will be in the “inner circle” chosen by the NFL and the Cleveland Browns to serve as draft ambassadors
- The NFL said the gesture is a “thank you” to those who are working tirelessly to help others during the coronavirus pandemic
- Other frontline workers and educators are among those chosen for the drafts “inner circle”
Claudia Hoyen has been a trained infectious disease physician for 30 years, and this past year, the coronavirus pandemic caused her to use all of her training and then some.
“You train and you train and you train over all these years, and, you know, this would really be like the Super Bowl for people in infectious diseases and public health,” Hoyen said.
Hoyen is the director of infection control at Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital and the co-director of infection control at University Hospitals Health System, and working to combat the coronavirus pandemic, or as she calls it her “Super Bowl,” consisted of coming up with patients and staff safety protocols for the entire hospital system.
“We had to figure out quickly how to keep our 30,000 employees safe, because again, if we don’t have health care workers during a pandemic, it’s just something that is not tolerable,” Hoyen said.
Because of her work, she’s one of the 50 University Hospital healthcare workers personally invited by the NFL and the Cleveland Browns to experience one of football’s other big events. The NFL Draft, taking place in downtown Cleveland, is an event that she said is a reflection of the contributions of healthcare workers across the country.
“Being able to have this draft is kind of an extension of all those things we learned in the hospital, you know, there’ll be social distancing though will be masking, you know people will be vaccinated, all these amazing things that we learned over the course of the year,” Hoyen said.
Hoyen is a part of the draft theater’s “inner circle,” which gives her and a guest front row seats to the draft stage. Hoyen’s guest will be her son, who because of her long hours and seven-day work weeks, hasn’t seen his mom much.
“My kids and my husband were all home and they were having this complete, like, family experience without me last year and, you know, I just, I feel just so lucky to, to be able to bring him back and spend a little time with him, just us together, knowing that he’s really going to enjoy this event,” she said.
Hoyen said this past year has been one of the hardest years the healthcare industry has faced, and she’s glad to experience some happiness alongside other healthcare heroes during this draft.
