Vigilance, Training, and Funding are Key for Outbreak and Pandemic Biopreparedness

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

Gavin Harris, MD, associate medical director, Serious Communicable Diseases Program (SCDP), Emory University, and director of Education and Outreach for the program, points out that although his unit was founded in 2002, it wasn’t until 2014 that they received their first viral hemorrhagic fever patients with Ebola. Emory Healthcare brought in patients with the disease to treat at their facilities that year, becoming the first US hospital institution to do so. They had trained for 12 years, carrying out continuous training drills and preparedness scenarios to be ready to care for patients when the time came.

“I can guarantee that if the team had not trained quarterly, these patients that we did take care of would not have done as well.”

Although Emory’s SCDP has been successful in treating patients with high-consequence infectious disease (HCID) such as Ebola, Harris points out there is not much training for residents nationally and this can be challenging for clinicians who might be seeing patients with HCID.

“We don't have a lot of preparedness training in general, and throughout my residency, my fellowships and beyond, it was training that had to be sought out if you were interested in it,” Harris said. “All of these folks are going to be at different institutions, different facilities—centers in which they will be the front lines when the next pandemic, unfortunately does occur, and people will look to them for guidance and for support, so establishing defined curriculum for pandemic preparedness, for disaster preparedness in general that really encompasses things like infection prevention and control practices, the use of optimized critical care support, the availability of specific agencies to whom to engage when these patients do present, I think, is very important.”

Aside from training and education around preparedness, the funding is always an ongoing issue especially when there are no current emergencies.

“When disasters occur, there's high visibility on the work that we do…funding is a bit easier to obtain. But, when there are no disasters, it's challenging, right? And so I think one of the things that our team does, is accept the funding sources for the moment, and we continue to train to prepare in the event that things may happen.”

In the next episode, Jill Morgan, RN, BSN, discusses how to ensure healthcare facilities maintain PPE readiness for emerging special pathogens.