Coulee Medical Center staffers training for Ebola fever

Even while much of the world is just waking up to what the potential spread of Ebola fever in Western Africa might mean for the rest of the globe, the local hospital in Grand Coulee is already making sure it won't be caught unprepared for the disease if it ever comes here.

Major hospitals in other parts of the United States have made dangerous mistakes in how they handle infected patients, even when they'd had protocols in place.

The staff at Coulee Medical Center is training for serious infection control to make sure that wouldn't happen here.

The key to success is a buddy system with a supervisor.

CMC is training three three-member teams to handle such highly infectious patients, but they are the last line of defensive treatment. The first is unavoidable when you walk in the front door.

That's where someone will ask you if you've recently traveled outside the country and if you have any flu-like symptoms. That simple precaution is in place now, but hospital visitors may soon witness a more involved step.

"We're actually going to have live drills at the hospital," Infection Control Nurse Sandy Edwards said last week, explaining the hospital's efforts to chamber of commerce members at a luncheon.

Such a drill will involve escorting a mock patient back out the front door by a nurse in a hazmat suit.

The hospital will strictly follow protocols set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Emory University Hospital's 84-page set of protocols. That facility in Atlanta, Georgia has set the standard for treatment Ebola in the U.S., having just discharged its fourth patient Oct. 28.

"That's going to help protect everybody," Edwards said.

Part of the protocols will also help protect patients and staff from other infectious diseases, namely influenza and enterovirus, both of which are present in Grant County now. If you're coughing, you'll be asked to put on a face mask.

Those who give specific answers to increasingly targeted questions about their travels, and who are sick, would be taken for treatment out of the main hospital building into the former imaging center just northeast of the helipad.

That building is set up to be an isolation ward where those three teams of Ebola-trained care givers would take care of a patient suspected of having that virus. The building has two rooms where a patient may have to wait as long as two or three days before being taken to another hospital. It takes 24 hours just to get the lab test back to rule out or confirm the presence of Ebola, Edwards said, then another 24 hours for a CDC team to take over the patient care and transport.