A Seattle-area woman has become an expert when it comes to stopping the spread of infectious diseases. What she thinks of Ebola.
Patricia Lynch has devoted her career to stopping the spread of infectious diseases. Now, with confirmed Ebola cases in the United States, she believes hospitals and doctors officers should evaluate how they interact with people.
'It is, in the U.S., a really golden opportunity to reassess isolation systems and the quality and frequency of infection control practices being perfectly performed for all patients,' she said Wednesday. 'Not just for patients who have a diagnosed infectious disease or suspected infectious disease but for all patients.'
Lynch's work spans nearly 50 years of hospital infection prevention. The research she and others produced in the 1980s led to the practice of body substance isolation. It called for healthcare workers to wear gloves and goggles to protect themselves from blood and other fluids during emergency medical treatment and other procedures.
She referenced one study she conducted in Seattle in the mid-1980s.
'Fewer than a third of the patients knew they were either Hepatitis B, Hepatitis C, or HIV positive and healthcare workers tended to not take adequate precautions unless the patient was known to have one of those diseases,' she recalled. 'Of course, two-thirds of them weren't.'
Now, because of the nature of Ebola, she said healthcare workers who care for those patients have to make quick decisions.
'The people who work in places where sick people come are the ones that are most likely to have to make decisions right away about what kind of precautions they need to take,' she said. 'They need to look at the situation and decide, 'Can this person be out in the general care environment - like waiting for an ER visit?' 'Do I need to wear gloves or a gown?' Those decisions need to be made quickly or easily ... by all of the people who work in those areas.'
She said when her team was implementing body substance isolation, they hired observers. They were often third-year student nurses or second-year physician trainees who would record whether staff took all of the protective steps they should.
'They would report the information back to the healthcare workers quickly enough so they could recognize themselves in it,' she said. 'People need very specific information in order to correct their practices or otherwise it's just kind of noise that doesn't mean anything.'
She said every hospital has an infection control service or an entire department, which could look into similar protocol.
'We may need more attention now to what would enable perfect performance for a variety of situations where protection hasn't been expected before. That, I believe, is probably the most important thing to learn,' she said. 'People are always hurried, they're always in a rush. But when the stakes are high, you kind of have to slow down and if you need an observer present to get through a difficult situation then there has to be flexibility to allow that to happen.'
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