Inna Sosina, MD
Inna Sosina, MD
Physician
NYC Health + Hospitals/McKinney
Protecting Vulnerable Patients in the Pandemic
From her childhood Ukrainian village of Balabino, Dr. Inna Sosina – an 18-year veteran at NYC Health + Hospitals/McKinney, a facility in Brooklyn that provides long-term, post-acute rehabilitation and adult day care – would take a half-hour train ride to Zaporzhie, the Ukrainian town where her grandmother lived. From the age of 6, Dr. Sosina remembers collecting medicinal herbs in the nearby woods and hills with her grandmother, who was known as a healer.
Those memories inspired her to graduate with a medical degree from the Russian State University of Medicine in Moscow before she moved to New York to serve marginalized patients in vulnerable need across the city – evaluating Social Security disabilities, helping with long-term care in homes for nursing and rehabilitation or attending to emergency medicine.
She knows that hospice is its own kind of emergency care, given that most of her patients have never had regular medical care and so are admitted with end-stage diseases. Without the benefits of consultant or inpatient services, she managed patients’ comorbidities during the pandemic – even extending capacity during the heavy waves of cases, given that clinics were closed at the time and hospitalizations were high risk due to her patients’ vulnerable health.
“At one point we had three COVID-19 units at McKinney,” she recalled. “It was devastating to see my residents in the COVID units when their rooms stayed empty. It was the hardest time for me. The proudest accomplishment was when we started to graduate our residents and almost all of them were able to return back to their former rooms on the units, and the COVID units were transitioned back to a dining area.”
Her expertise is in long-term care, and it shows through almost two decades of service.
“She has taken busy night and weekend calls when COVID-19 was once again at a peak, allowing her colleagues a few hours of rest before returning to the fight,” said Robert Holland, McKinney’s Chief Medical Officer. “All the while, she has remained professional and optimistic – there is no COVID fatigue here!”