Ebola Lapses Persisted for Days at Dallas Hospital
By MATT SEDENSKY
ABCNews.com
Oct 18, 2014
Just minutes after Thomas Eric Duncan arrived for a second time at the emergency room, the word is on his chart: “Ebola.” But despite all the warnings that the deadly virus could arrive unannounced at an American hospital, for days after the admission, his caregivers are vulnerable.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has pointed to lapses by the hospital in those initial days. And Duncan’s medical records show heightened protective measures as his illness advanced. But either because of a lag in implementing those steps or because they were still insufficient, scores of hospital staffers were put at risk, according to the records.
The hospital’s protective protocol was “insufficient,” said Dr. Joseph McCormick of the University of Texas School of Public Health, who was part of the CDC team that investigated the first recorded Ebola outbreak in 1976. “The gear was inadequate. The procedures in the room were inadequate.”
Duncan’s medical records, provided by his family to The Associated Press, show Nina Pham, the first Texas nurse to be diagnosed with Ebola, first encountered the patient after he was moved to intensive care at 4:40 p.m. on Sept. 29, more than 30 hours after he came to the ER. Nearly 27 hours later, Amber Joy Vinson, a second nurse who contracted the disease, first appears in Duncan’s charts.
Because doctors and nurses are focused on logging the patient’s care, they may not always note their own safeguards in the medical records. In Pham’s first entry, she makes no mention of protective gear. When she logs again the following morning, she specifically mentions wearing a double gown, face shield and protective footwear, equipment she mentions again in later entries.
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