In August 2014, the first of what would come to be four patients infected with the Ebola virus came through the doors of Emory University Hospital’s Serious Communicable Diseases Unit. The unit, staffed in partnership with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was one of only four units in the United States equipped to treat serious infectious diseases like Ebola. Colleen Kraft, Associate Professor of Infectious Diseases at Emory’s School of Medicine who currently leads research in the SCDU, was working in the unit first-hand with the patients.
Those patients included Kent Brantly, a doctor from the United States infected with the Zaire strain of the virus, the deadliest strain of Ebola, while working in Liberia. Two days later, Nancy Writebol, a missionary worker who had contracted the virus in Liberia, was flown to Emory. On September 9, Ian Crozier, a doctor who volunteered at an Ebola Treatment Unit in Kenema, Sierra Leone, and was the most critically ill of Emory’s Ebola patients, was flown in. Lastly, Amber Vinson, a nurse infected while caring for a patient with Ebola at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, was transferred to Emory on October 15.
Kraft, along with lead SCDU nurse Sharon Vanairsdale, were painstakingly rehearsing the protocols for donning and doffing personal protective equipment and cleaning the unit on a near continuous loop.
“At the time, while we were in the throes of taking care of patients with Ebola, we didn’t think a lot about how much the experience would ultimately change our perspective on health care,” says Kraft. “We were literally just trying to keep ourselves safe all the time.”
By the time the last patient was discharged with a clean bill of health on October 28, 2014, both Kraft and Vanairsdale were already beginning to have crucial conversations about the rigorous protocols they had used and wondering what would happen if they were to translate those practices to everyday use.
“We just started thinking: how many hospital-acquired infections could we prevent if we were to just take these learnings and apply these to every day patient care?” says Vanairsdale.
Together they’ve established new, innovative training that involves virtual reality and augmented reality. Vanairsdale has partnered with the HHS, Nebraska Medicine, and NYC Health + Hospitals to educate more than 10,000 health care workers on caring for patients with infectious diseases. Kraft is a part of The National Ebola Training and Education Center (NETEC), an organization committed to increasing the capability of public health care systems in the United States to handle Ebola and other special pathogen incidents.
With infectious disease rates on the rise and growing concerns over antibiotic resistance, Kraft and Vanairsdale know the next pandemic is closer than we think.