U.S. and local health officials want to set up dedicated hospitals in each state for Ebola patients, part of a new emphasis on safety for health-care workers after a nurse caring for an infected patient in Dallas tested positive for the virus. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is also reconsidering its existing infection control protocols and will boost health-worker training with a series of calls and online seminars, officials said yesterday. All hospitals must be prepared to identify potential Ebola patients, even if they don't handle long-term care for infected individuals, Tumpey said in a telephone interview. Identifying a hospital in each state is "going to be a long process," she said. "It's not happening overnight."
Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas is changing its infection control procedures in an effort to reduce the Ebola infection risk for its staff, said Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "We have to rethink the way we address Ebola infection control because even a single infection is unacceptable," Frieden said Monday during a national media briefing in Atlanta. The hospital announced Sunday that one of its critical care nurses was infected while treating Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan, who died Wednesday. The nurse was identified today as being Nina Pham, who now is isolated in a hospital intensive care unit.
The country's largest union and professional association of registered nurses on Sunday said American hospitals are still not communicating policies to health care workers regarding how to handle potential Ebola patients. National Nurses United also said that 85 percent of 1,900 nurses surveyed said their hospitals have not provided education about the virus in a setting that allows nurses to interact with or ask administrators questions. "As has been shown in Dallas, they are not prepared," NNU co-president Deborah Burger said in a press conference in Oakland, Calif. Burger said that companies who remove and expose Ebola-contaminated materials are better prepared than hospital personnel.
When a hospital system with thousands of employees is bleeding $10 million a month, tension is going to come to a head at some point. But news Friday that the Los Altos Hills-based Daughters of Charity Health System's six hospitals and foundation are set to be sold to for-profit Southern California conglomerate Prime Healthcare Services for $300 million in cash and $450 million in other financial pledges represents much more than a business transaction. The deal underscores simmering political controversy, financial turmoil and anxiety about how to deliver quality medical care at lower costs — realities that Silicon Valley, like much of the rest of the United States, is now being forced to confront amid a rapidly changing healthcare landscape.
A Democratic lawmaker is using the second confirmed case of Ebola in the United States to demand that $120 million be restored to a federal program that helps hospitals plan for emergencies. Sen. Bob Casey Jr. (D-Pa.), a member of the Senate Finance Committee, said the funding has been dramatically cut over the past decade. "The news that a nurse who treated the Ebola patient in Texas has now become infected with the virus herself highlights the need for ongoing training and education for health care workers and drills and exercises for hospitals," Casey wrote in a letter sent Monday to Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) and ranking member Richard Shelby (R-Ala.)
Many Medicare beneficiaries treated at primarily rural "critical access" hospitals end up paying between two and six times more for outpatient services than do patients at other hospitals, according to a report released Wednesday by the inspector general at the Department of Health and Human Services. There are more than 1,200 critical access hospitals, which are generally the sole hospital in rural areas and can have no more than 25 beds. Medicare pays them more generously so they won't go out of business. In Minnesota, more than 50 percent of hospitals are critical access hospitals.