While state officials express confidence, health care professionals are preparing on the front lines.
At the University of Virginia Medical Center staff was invited to a lunch-time discussion of ebola. That presentation suggests one of Virginia’s premiere teaching hospitals could handle a couple of cases but maybe not a major outbreak.
The PhD who organized this week’s program, Marcia Day Childress, told a crowd of more than 200 people that “the epidemic in Africa is shaping up to be both a healthcare emergency and a humanitarian catastrophe of historic proportion,” but planning for the talk itself did not inspire confidence here. The auditorium and overflow room filled quickly, leaving about 50 administrators, doctors and nurses crowded in the back – standing for more than an hour.
What they heard was unnerving. Virologist Frederick Hayden described the situation in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.
“The number of cases are doubling every two to three weeks, and some recent projections have suggested that we may be seeing as many as 5-10,000 cases on a weekly basis later this year.”
Of course, Virginia is not West Africa.
“One statistic I saw indicated that Liberia, a country with over 4 million people, there were 51 physicians.”
UVA , he said, has ten times as many doctors. The medical center actually began comprehensive planning for how to treat emerging infectious disease in May. Epidemiologist Costi Sifri says there’s a robust plan in place to deal with one or two patients.
“This plan was tested on September 13th, when we had a person from West Africa who came in to the institution. We who saw that patient thought there was a real possibility that the person had ebola.”
Tests showed otherwise, and since then, about two dozen doctors and nurses have been trained to use the highest CDC standards for protection while caring for people with ebola. The approach involves a checklist and a buddy system, in which one health care professional watches another as he or she puts on and takes off protective garb. All total, the med center plans to have about 50 people trained to care for ebola patients.
“We’re really going to limit the number of people that are taking care of these patients. It’s not the type of patient where we need to have a medical student, resident, fellow and physician take care of those patients. It’s going to be directed to those people that have to be there, that are well trained and want to be there.”
Still to be trained – people who might transport patients with ebola and those who must clean up and dispose of medical waste. A screening process is in place, and anyone who arrives with a fever or some other symptom of ebola and has recently been to W. Africa will be isolated for testing and care.
