Last week Providence St. Patrick hospital in Missoula announced that it’s ready to take care of a patient with Ebola if it’s asked.
The hospital has special facilities and expertise because of its proximity to the National Institutes of Health’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton. Researchers there work with dangerous infectious agents, including Ebola, and St. Pat’s has long been prepared to treat someone from the lab if necessary.
But, not everyone in the area is comfortable with the idea of a patient with Ebola being treated locally.
That’s exactly the situation Omaha, Nebraska found itself in when a patient with Ebola was sent to Nebraska Medical Center yesterday. A second patient with the virus arrived there yesterday. Shelly Schwedhelm, the nursing director the hospital's biocontainment unit says most locals don’t really think it’s a big deal.
"You know I just don’t think people are that concerned about us," Schwedhelm says. "We've been around for a while and we've had conversations with them and it's been very transparent."
But Schwedhelm acknowledges that the hospital got a lot of help dealing with people concerned about Ebola in their community from the local public health department. Dr. Anne O’Keefe is lead epidemiologist for that health department, Douglas County’s.
"We worked with the medical center to put up an information line," O'Keefe says. "We had phone lines set up in a sort of call center and started with about 12 staff who answered phones. We didn’t know how many calls we would get."
O’Keefe says that when the first patient with Ebola arrived in September, they got about 60 phone calls that day, and then just a handful in subsequent days.
"They had questions all over the board," she says. "The most common ones were about Ebola and how it spread, and they wanted to know is Omaha safe? If they could go to their appointment at the medical center still. Some people wanted to know details about the actual biocontainment unit at the hospital, how it works, how it can assure the disease won't be transmitted to health care workers or other patients."
Schwedhelm says the hospital did plenty of education on their end, too.
"We did a lot from an internal prospective here in our hospital for our employees," Schwedhelm says, "as well as a letter that we gave to every patient who was an inpatient in our facility when we were getting the first patient, so they could have their questions answered. And somebody could reach out to them personally if they needed."
The Health Department’s O’Keefe says the big information push by her agency and the hospital together resulted in Omaha not really freaking out at the idea of being the receiving point for people with a disease that’s causing fear all over the world.
"Yeah, I think so," O'Keefe says, "but I think that there were a group of people that had something to say, they wanted to tell us, and some of them were not very nice."
O’Keefe says she thinks the information campaign has really helped Omaha stay calm, but she’s concerned about being able to keep up with the misinformation she sees being spread on social media.
"I think that’s a huge contributor to what’s going on right now," she says. "The rumors have just been flying so much faster than anything else we have ever seen, so I definitely think its a huge issue. We need to figure out how to kind of keep our message out there."
Both O’Keefe and Schwedhelm say they also want people to know that the doctors and nurses who work in hospitals with facilities set up to care for patients with Ebola, like Missoula’s St. Patrick Hospital, do it because the feel a deep need to help, and that they take the job of protecting themselves and preventing the spread of dangerous diseases seriously.
