Local hospitals are ramping up efforts to prepare for an Ebola case, and El Camino Hospital is no exception. Through safety drills, staff training and developing a plan for coping with the infectious disease, medical officials say they could handle a case without endangering hospital staff.
The often-fatal disease has spread throughout West Africa and the rest of the world. There are now nearly 10,000 reported cases of Ebola in West Africa, according to the World Health Organization, and cases continue to trickle into the United States. Ebola patient Dr. Craig Spencer was placed in isolation at a New York hospital on Oct. 23 after returning from Guinea, where he was treating Ebola patients.
Ebola has flu-like symptoms including fever, abdominal pain and vomiting, as well as internal and external bleeding. The disease is spread through blood or other body fluids contaminated with the virus and is not spread through air or by water, according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC).
El Camino Hospital has prepared extensively for the virus despite the “very low” chances that an Ebola case will make it to the smaller community hospital, according to Dr. Eric Pifer, El Camino Hospital’s chief medical officer. Pifer said the hospital established a task force that meets every week on a strategic plan for dealing with a patient infected with Ebola.
One of the challenges, he said, is that if hospital staff suspects patients might have Ebola, they need to treat the patients as if they have it until a state or regional medical center determines whether the patient tests positive. That hasn’t happened yet, as the hospital has yet to receive a patient who has shown the flu-like symptoms associated with Ebola after traveling to the three West African countries where the disease is prevalent — Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Still, there’s general anxiety over Ebola in the community, and even among hospital staff, including rumors of expected or possible cases of the virus, Pifer said.
“We feel like there’s so much attention on this that it can create more problems here in the community than it solves,” he said.
Beyond the task force and logistics planning, the hospital has also done a number of safety and practice drills to run through exactly how staff would treat a patient with the virus, including transferring the patient from the emergency department to intensive care.
In the drills — on Oct. 15 and Oct. 23 — hospital staff worked with a simulated case of a person who had traveled from West Africa and was displaying some of the flu-like symptoms associated with Ebola. Pifer said as the virus progresses, patient symptoms start to include intestinal problems and bleeding, complicating treatment and care.
Doctors and nurses handling an Ebola patient will be suited up in waterproof clothes, based on recommendations by the Centers for Disease Control, and respiratory masks. Pifer said hospital staff has practiced the process of putting on and safely taking off the protective suits, as well as a subsequent decontamination process.
The hospital also has four “negative-pressure” rooms — rooms that generate negative pressure and allow air flow into the room but not out — that could house Ebola patients. Though negative-pressure rooms are normally for airborne, infectious diseases like tuberculosis — a relatively common disease in the Bay Area — the CDC recommends using negative-pressure rooms for Ebola patients to reduce possible exposure to the virus.
Pifer said he can’t say for sure how many Ebola cases El Camino Hospital could handle at one time, and that in the event of more than one case, the hospital would consider transferring patients to a nearby facility.
There were some lessons learned, Pifer said, from the “breakdowns” in the way that nurses and staff at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital protected themselves in treating Eric Duncan, the first patient diagnosed with Ebola in the United States since the start of the outbreak in west Africa. He said in the later stages of the virus, the patient produces about 10 liters of “body fluid” contaminated with Ebola every day, which the hospital struggled to manage.
Kaiser Permanente has taken similar steps towards preparing for Ebola as well. According to an email sent out by the health care group, Kaiser has updated caregivers with the equipment and training needed to treat a patient with the virus, and is following national and state guidelines for early detection and care. The email includes information on symptoms and how the disease is spread, and emphasizes that the risk of contracting the disease in the U.S. is minimal.
More information on Ebola, including symptoms and transmission of the disease, can be found at www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola.
Email Kevin Forestieri at kforestieri@mv-voice.com
