Gonzalez: Hospital nurses claim lack of Ebola protocols are concerning

Texas Presbyterian Hospital administrators kept Thomas Duncan, the first person to die of Ebola in the U.S., waiting for hours in the emergency room with up to seven other patients before placing him in isolation, according to nurses at the Dallas hospital who issued a statement Tuesday night and answered questions through the nation’s biggest nursing union.

In an unusual telephone call, the nurses claimed:

-The hospital had no protocols in place to handle Ebola cases.

-Supervisors walked in and out of Duncan’s isolation room without proper protective gear.

 

-Duncan’s lab specimens were moved through the hospital’s pneumatic tube system instead of being separately sealed and delivered, and thus “the entire tube system was potentially contaminated.”

-Nurses were not fully covered in protective gear, with their wrists, necks and heads exposed to possible contamination.

RoseAnn DeMoro, the head of National Nurses United, the country’s largest nurses union and the organizer of the press conference, did not identify any of the nurses, or even the number participating in the call.

She said she had to protect them from possible discipline by hospital officials who have forbidden any employees from talking to talk to the press.

None of the nurses, DeMoro said, was a member of her union.

Meanwhile, one of the nurses who treated Duncan, 26-year-old Nina Pham, battles Ebola in a Dallas hospital, and DeMoro said health care workers across America are more frightened and angry than they’ve ever been.

“There’s been no education in this country to hospital staffs except to refer them to the CDC [Centers for Disease Control] website,” DeMoro told the Daily News earlier in the day. “Nurses have literally been in the dark.”

In a sign of their discontent, the union has organized an unprecedented national telephone conference call for Wednesday at 3 p.m., with more than 6,400 nurses already registered to participate.

The dreaded Ebola virus has been sweeping through West Africa for seven months, with the number of sick and dead mounting in ghastly fashion, and with rich countries sending too little help, too slowly.

During all that time, health industry and federal officials assured the public the U.S. hospital system was prepared.

DeMoro and her union challenged that rosy picture.

“We’ve had a country in mass denial about a dangerous epidemic,” she said.

She has been sounding the warning bell even before the hospital in Dallas botched its handling of a sick Liberian named Thomas Eric Duncan. On Oct. 8, Duncan became the first person to die of Ebola on U.S. soil. Soon after, nurse Pham became the first to contract the disease in this country.

It’s now evident all those smug assurances were more hype than real.

DeMoro’s union conducted a survey during the past few days of 2,300 nurses in 46 states. The results are pretty shocking.

More than 70% said they hadn’t been given adequate training about Ebola; 36% claimed their hospitals don’t even have sufficient supplies of face shields and fluid-resistant gowns to handle patients with the disease.

Still, those face shields and gowns recommended by the CDC are not enough protection, DeMoro insisted.

Her union is demanding hazmat suits for every hospital, the same ones CDC uses for its staff.

It wants crash training courses for all hospital workers, with sessions where they can actually practice containment procedures and ask questions of live instructors.

“We don’t need a paint by the numbers website,” she said.

CDC head Thomas Frieden acknowledged the problem Tuesday, saying he’s “heard loud and clear” the concerns of health workers that they’re not prepared to deal with Ebola.

Selecting just a handful of hospitals to house Ebola cases, is not the answer, because a person who gets sick will usually head to their local emergency room.

Here in New York, officials have chosen Bellevue Hospital as the designated Ebola treatment center.

“Bellevue is one facility that has done a good job of handling these type patients in a safe manner,” said Lisa Baum, health and safety representative for New York State Nurses Association, the local affiliate to National Nurses United.

But “it’s a mixed bag” right now at other hospitals in the city, Baum warned.

Many don’t have appropriate isolation units, she said. Those units should include not only negative pressurized rooms for the patients, but anterooms with sinks and bathrooms for the staff to wash and put on and remove their protective gear.

The city’s private hospitals and another large health care union, 1199/SEIU, have scheduled an emergency Oct. 21 training session for thousands of workers at the Javits Convention Center.