Posted on 10/04/2014 7:02:31 AM PDT by maggief
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Nurses, the frontline care providers in U.S. hospitals, say they are untrained and unprepared to handle patients arriving in their hospital emergency departments infected with Ebola.
(snip)
A survey by National Nurses United of some 400 nurses in more than 200 hospitals in 25 states found that more than half (60 percent) said their hospital is not prepared to handle patients with Ebola, and more than 80 percent said their hospital has not communicated to them any policy regarding potential admission of patients infected by Ebola.
Another 30 percent said their hospital has insufficient supplies of eye protection and fluid-resistant gowns.
"If there are protocols in place, the nurses are not hearing them and the nurses are the ones who are exposed," said RoseAnn DeMoro, executive director of National Nurses United, which serves as both a union and a professional association for U.S. nurses.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
BTTT!
Don't forget the morgue and disposal of the body.
LOL - well put.
Good grief, Gator! I’m glad you made it through all that and I am upset that you suffered like that. Dang.
In the past decade, 5 cases of hemorrhagic fever have been imported into the US--one case of Marburg and 4 cases of Lassa. These are all considered level 4 agents, all are quarantinable by executive order, and all of those cases were managed through the normal infectious disease protocols that exist at every hospital. Not a single one of those led to a secondary infection of health care workers.
The Marburg case is especially interesting. Marburg is sister to Ebola, being from the same virus family and causing nearly identical disease with a high death rate. The patient was hospitalized in Jan, 2008, and had a surgical intervention while in the hospital. For continuing weakness, she received a blood transfusion after being released from the hospital. She was not diagnosed with Marburg until July 2008, when she requested retesting because she had heard about a Dutch tourist who had developed a fatal case of Marburg after visiting a bat cave in Uganda. The woman had also visited that cave in December, 2007, days before falling ill.
If health care workers were able to treat a woman with Marburg and manage to avoid getting sick even though they didn't know she had Marburg, I'm fairly certain that any hospital can do the same with Ebola, especially since they will know they are dealing with Ebola.
Your response is eloquent but mistaken.
First, not every hospital is a tertiary care hospital,
and even Walmart now sees the ill. There is a very wide
range in the capacity and ability of health care.
Second, as you have seen in this first case, the system
does NOT always work. Here the patient even said where
he was from, but nothing was reported up the chain.
Third, being certain is hardly a guarantee.
Americans want the highest likelihood of their
survival -— free of disease. And they deserve it,
although Obola and the EXEMPT Congress disagree.
No we don’t.
That is not a breakdown of the system, it was a human error. Unfortunately, even people who work in hospitals are only human and prone to mistakes; in this case, the mistake led to a two day delay in isolating this man, during which he could expose others.
In my experience, hospitals are always reviewing procedures--usually because of some human error like this one--and trying to devise new protocols to address the pitfalls of the previous procedures. I have no doubt that hospital and CDC officials are discussing this lapse (ad nauseum) and brainstorming ways to avoid such lapses in the future; probably the hospital staff is being retrained on procedures. It is probably impossible to come up with a foolproof procedure, but we do what we can.
~It is difficult to understand your garbled attempt at using the English language, but it seems you are trying to say that nurses should be willing to die because patient care is their profession.~
How can they say they are unprepared? From that I learnt about Ebola it is not that much a big deal and it transmits the way many other diseases do. Are they incompetent or what?
“I heard that the hazmat cleanup for Duncan re: the apartment he’d been staying is about $65,000.”
For $65k one would think that would provide more than a couple of mexicans and a power washer and a crappy job of wrapping the car in plastic.
Of course that is government dollars. In the real world that work could be done for $6,500 at the most.
Thanks for the ping!
Youre Welcome, Alamo-Girl!
My wife is a clinical nurse specialist. From what she tells me and what I see, this is about what I expected.
For the average person, such PPE would be as much of a liability as an asset because they might offer a false sense of security. They're good for a "bug-out" procedure, and not much more. Taking it off safely is tricky and requires practice.
Only the 0bola voters think that.
(You’re right about his true attitude, though.)
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