Training Healthcare Professionals to Treat High-Consequence Infectious Disease

We are continuing our series, Media Day, where we spotlight individual medical institutions and their infectious disease (ID) programs. This episode profiles Emory Healthcare.

Sharon Carrasco DNP, APRN, ACNS-BC, ANP-C, CEN, FAEN, FAAN, FNAP, is the director of the Region 4 Regional Emerging Special Pathogen Treatment Center (RESPTC) based at Emory University Hospital, and trains healthcare professionals both at Emory and outside her institution for treating high-consequence infectious disease (HCID). She said they take a multifaceted approach to working with peers so they can be prepared.

Prior to the pandemic they were doing more in-person trainings, which she felt people seemed to get more out of them. During the pandemic years, they moved to tutorial videos and remote learning. However, more recently, Carrasco said they have not only been able to keep their remote training but also reimplement in-person learning, depending on healthcare professionals’ availability.

And she says it is vital to conduct training across specialties before a potential patient with HCID presents. 

“I think the caring for patients with special pathogens requires a team, and it's not just nursing, it's not just physicians, and advanced practice providers—it's the whole team,” Carrasco said. “And so, having those interprofessional trainings and those that work together is critically important…even the trainings that we do here locally at Emory are always interprofessional; the time to get to know somebody is not at the time of an event. We don't want our providers and our nurses and our lab technologists to first meet each other when we're being activated. We want them to be training in advance.”

Ultimately, Carrasco says it is about getting everyone who could be having a touchpoint with patients with HCID to be prepared to ask the right questions and treat the patients with care and not fear.

“The identify, isolate, and inform component of preparedness is so critically important; pushing and advocating for that, so everybody at every point of entry knows how to do a travel screen and symptom screen, so they can safely identify any potential patients, knowing how and where to isolate these individuals, and then informing the appropriate officials,” she said. “But, most importantly, is not forgetting that there's a patient there, and really making sure that we don't ignore that patient, but rather initiate appropriate care.”

In the next episode, Katherine Normile provides insights on important laboratory safety practices.