Back in the day, nurses will tell you, if a doctor came into a room and no chair was available for him, a nurse would have to give up her seat. Those days are long gone, but for a long time, nurses didn't have a guaranteed seat at the health care policy table—until now. The Ebola epidemic, and its intrusion into the U.S. health care system, brought nurses fully into the national conversation about how to handle this potential public health threat. For the overall good of our health care system, we need to stay there.
With an estimated 25 million new people becoming insured over the next few years, a coalition of family physicians has a message for the country: Don't forget about us. The timing is right for the group, which on Thursday announced a five-year, $20 million campaign aimed at promoting the importance of primary care. The flood of newly insured patients presents a big opportunity for primary care doctors, when you consider this: just one-third of uninsured adults said they have a regular doctor, about half the rate of the insured population, according to a 2013 Kaiser Family Foundation survey.
Inside the seventh-floor biocontainment unit at Nebraska Medical Center where Ashoka Mukpo's life was saved, medical crews worked, gingerly, to remove any lingering trace of the lethal virus. They incinerated pounds of infectious waste. Their gowns and head coverings, and loose papers and personal belongings left over from their patient, were being decontaminated with blasts of high-pressure steam. For 48 hours, the 10-bed unit — the largest of its kind in the United States — will sit dormant as doctors hope for any remnants of the Ebola virus to dissipate on their own. Then, another round of cleaning begins — this time, using ultraviolet rays to zap anything that remains of the virus. The biocontainment staff of about 60 takes protective measures beyond those recommended by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Health officials at the center of nation's Ebola crisis are moving into overdrive to tame widespread public fears about the disease. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has announced three new protocols in the three days as it looks to assert control over the deadly virus that infected two Americans this month. "The bottom line here is that we have to keep up our guard against Ebola," Frieden told reporters Wednesday as he announced a three-week mandatory monitoring period for anyone traveling into the United States from West Africa.
As the fear of Ebola spreads to developed economies, U.S. and British insurance companies have begun writing Ebola exclusions into standard policies to cover hospitals, event organizers and other businesses vulnerable to local disruptions. As a result, new policies and renewals will become costlier for companies opting to insure business travel to West Africa or to cover the risk of losses from quarantine shutdowns at home, industry officials told Reuters. "What underwriters are doing at the moment is they're generally providing quotes either excluding or including Ebola - and it's much more expensive if Ebola is included," said Gary Flynn, an event cancellation broker at Jardine Lloyd Thompson Group Plc in London .
The Ebola crisis is forcing the American healthcare system to consider the previously unthinkable: withholding some medical interventions because they are too dangerous to doctors and nurses and unlikely to help a patient. U.S. hospitals have over the years come under criticism for undertaking measures that prolong dying rather than improve patients' quality of life. But the care of the first Ebola patient diagnosed in the United States, who received dialysis and intubation and infected two nurses caring for him, is spurring hospitals and medical associations to develop the first guidelines for what can reasonably be done and what should be withheld.