Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7fkt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T22:31:21.874Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Keeping our Healthcare Workers Safe–Ebola and COVID-19

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 July 2023

Yanti Turang*
Affiliation:
LSU, New Orleans, USA
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.
Introduction:

Over the past decade, the world has wrestled with two major pandemics: Ebola and COVID-19. While Ebola revealed that we needed a strategy, Covid-19 showed we still didn't have one. Apart from ensuring that we isolate and contain the virus, one of the major concerns in responding to a pandemic is limiting transmission to healthcare personnel.

Method:

This presentation describes a clinician's experience with employing the same infection control strategies used for Ebola in a makeshift Ebola Treatment Unit in a school in Sierra Leone and at a COVID-19 alternate care facility built in a convention center in the US.

Results:

Transmission control strategies used for healthcare workers during Ebola were also successful for COVID-19. Both facilities, despite grossly different access to financial resources, ensured all clinicians didn’t break protocol of safety, due to rigorous donning and doffing entrances and exits, internalized individual risk, separated spaces with tape, and zoned areas.

Conclusion:

Two facilities with access to vastly different resources to treat two distinct infectious diseases used the same infection control measures for staff with success. Highlighting the priority of internalization of risk by healthcare workers alongside critical infection control measures proves to be the most valuable resource over multi-million dollar facilities erected during COVID.

Type
Lightning and Oral Presentations
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of World Association for Disaster and Emergency Medicine