Panic? Hospitals now have an “Ebola Checklist”
“Now is the time to prepare.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has released a new “ebola checklist” detailing the best practices for hospitals and health care professionals who are tasked with treating patients infected with the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD.)
From the checklist:
In order to enhance our collective preparedness and response efforts, this checklist highlights key areas for hospital staff — especially hospital emergency management officers, infection control practitioners, and clinical practitioners — to review in preparation for a person with EVD arriving at a hospital for medical care. The checklist provides practical and specific suggestions to ensure your hospital is able to detect possible EVD cases, protect your employees, and respond appropriately.
While we are not aware of any domestic EVD cases (other than two American citizens who were medically evacuated to the United States), now is the time to prepare, as it is possible that individuals with EVD in West Africa may travel to the United States, exhibit signs and symptoms of EVD, and present to facilities.
The checklist’s provisions appear to have the goal of holding hospitals accountable for following protocol, training their employees in EVD detection, and being prepared to isolate patients and protect staff. It also provides a “quick resources list” that administrators and providers can use to educate staff about the disease, help answer questions from the community, and follow the status of outbreaks.
The checklist makes it clear that there is no evidence of an EVD outbreak in the United States; this is simply the CDC’s way of preparing hospitals for the possibility–and it’s wise of them to start now.
The EVD outbreak in West Africa has now exposed four Americans to the virus; additionally, members of our military have been sent to Africa to help organize an active response to the disease. Whether or not you agree with this policy decision, or the decisions of American missionaries who choose to serve in volatile regions, it’s hard to argue against this new CDC mandate to get supplied, get educated, and get prepared. If health care professionals aren’t currently prepared to deal with ebola, the time to change that is now. Yesterday, even. The politics of Health and Human Services’ actions will cease to matter if this thing hits the fan and lives are at risk.
Hopefully, if and when ebola does hit our shores, our preparation will have been enough.
You can read the entire “Hospital Checklist” here.
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Comments
I think it would be a lovely gesture on obamullah’s part to send the first lady and his daughters to ebolaland as a goodwill humanitarian gesture. It would demonstrate that this is a perfectly safe place to deploy our military people to, as he’s planned.
Meanwhile, back at the VA………….
Well, the first family isn’t going to go but there are a lot of government employees who could be used before our military. Think of all the dead weight at the EPA, IRS, Dept of Education,
Dept of Agriculture, FEMA, etc… They could be deployed in a bunch of cargo planes to deliver supplies.
I would bet the head of the IRS would find those hard drives real fast if his choice was to cough up the hard drives or cough up his spleen.
This is an inappropriate use of our military, and an unnecessary risk to them and to us.
Sending our military folks to this area under these circumstances where the only ROE will be to stand down is an invitation to another Benghazi-style debacle.
And that’s an entirely separate issue from the cynical, negligent decision to force our military people, who signed up to protect and defend our nation at a military level, into a filthy, disease-ridden “humanitarian” mission.
The United States has no “military interest” in the health concerns of west Africa. Of course, I may have missed the report about terrorist organizations going into west Africa to seek Ebola to weaponize it. Barring that, the decision is a slap in the face to our military.
I wonder if obamullah would be able to get away with this if he hadn’t purged the military of all higher command who know he’s a fool and may have objected to using the military as a petri dish for social experimentation and obamullah’s personal ideological adventures.
Yes.
Nothing Obama does is appropriate or wise.
Anybody who believes the CDC about anything except the close particulars of the scientific subject matters of their laboratory research or the government in general about anything at all under this administration is an absolute fool.
I knew the suggestion to use the US military was coming: everything that another agency is not competent to handle seems to get turned into a military mission.
Our military is not trained for this. Further, the risk of infection is unacceptably high, in part because it would jeopardize their core mission, which is to defend and protect our country.
This is a job for civilians trained in epidemiology. If we must use our military or national guard, it should be used to enforce the quarantine at our borders.
saw a similar checklist posted all over the hospital in calgary over the labor day weekend.
Panic? I’d panic, maybe, if they didn’t have this. I showed it to my wife, who is no expert, but is a retired nursing educator with a career in public health behind her. Looked OK to her.