Some facilities run elaborate drills as others merely hand out flyers
A few days before the Ebola-infected Thomas Eric Duncan arrived in Dallas-Fort Worth Airport to reunite with his fiancee, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a sternly worded alert to the nation’s hospitals.
“Now is the time to prepare,” the memo said in bolded letters at the beginning of a detailed six-page checklist of steps that hospitals should take to ready themselves for a patient like Duncan. “Every hospital should ensure that it can detect a patient with Ebola.”
As is clear now, Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas was not ready to detect Ebola — they sent Duncan home with antibiotics after he showed up with a fever and vomiting, and acknowledged he had recently been in Liberia. He came into contact with dozens of people after that — including schoolchildren — before his disease worsened and he returned to the hospital in an ambulance.
On Wednesday, he died.
CDC Director Thomas Frieden called the hospital’s lapse a “teachable moment,” and the agency sent out another round of alerts to hospitals last week, again urging them to prepare themselves for the incurable and highly fatal disease.
But in the decentralized U.S. health care system, hospitals don’t necessarily have to take the CDC’s advice — and federal funding streams to help them do so have been slashed in recent years. The result is a health care system where some hospitals are running intense, life-like drills featuring hypothetical Ebola patients and others are just now beginning to send around memos on the topic.
“We hope that hospitals will disseminate this information to their staff members,” CDC spokeswoman Melissa Brower told Yahoo News in an email. But just in case they don’t, the agency also sends their messages to other groups, such as professional organizations for emergency room employees.
