The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday unveiled its latest weapons for fighting Ebola and other infectious diseases—a series of video training modules developed by Johns Hopkins Medicine.
The videos are designed to better prepare emergency department health workers to safely identify and manage a patient who potentially has the Ebola virus or some other infectious disease. The four modules are part of a series titled Ebola Preparedness: Emergency Department Guidelines.
“We thought it was a great idea to make videos that would actually take doctors, nurses and emergency department administrators through the process step by step of what it looks like when someone comes into an emergency department and screens positive for Ebola and also how they could implement these CDC guidelines,” said Dr. J. Lee Jenkins, assistant professor of emergency medicine at The Johns Hopkins Hospital.
The modules are based on the CDC's recommended strategy for handling possible Ebola patients that calls for identifying, isolating and evaluation, but goes through their practical applications as a means of lessening the chance for human error in such situations, said Ayse Gurses, a human factors engineer with the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality.
“This allowed us to identify potential safety risks and work with clinical experts to develop feasible recommendations that mitigate these risks, minimizing potential errors that could lead to the further spread of the diseases,” Gurses said.
Jenkins and Gurses denied that the development of the videos was a direct response to the mistakes made in the case of Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person to be diagnosed with Ebola in the U.S. last September. Duncan visited Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas on Sept. 25, where he was initially discharged though he had a fever and had disclosed he had recently traveled from Africa.
Hospital officials have explained it as a breakdown in communications among the care team assigned to Duncan that caused the error, though that explanation later changed to a glitch in the electronic health record that prevented some clinicians from viewing Duncan's travel history. The hospitals later retracted that explanation.
The series marks the second course produced by the Armstrong Institute for CDC. The first training video focused on illustrating CDC guidelines on proper use of personal protective equipment.
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