Look for “the Rock People” in the Emergency Department, Operating Room and ICU

UAB undergraduate Paige Farley is one of the "rock people.”

That’s the nickname from University Hospital doctors, nurses and staffers as Farley roams the teeming medical center — at any time, day or night — wearing black scrubs with the monogram “ROC, Alabama Resuscitation Center.”

Her 12-hour shift starts in the Emergency Department, the busy portal that serves 85,000 trauma and sick patients each year. But her work as the Emergency Department’s lead research assistant also takes her into hospital operating rooms, intensive-care units, step-down units, the kidney transplant floor, assorted medical laboratories and other buildings of the nation’s third-largest public hospital and vibrant medical research center.