Use the flu to test your hospital isolation methods
Emergency Management Alert, November 30, 2004
Emergency rooms swarm with flu patients each year. Just like a potential smallpox patient, influenza patients can easily spread the disease in your emergency room. Then, you must track down who sat in the waiting room.
If you treat flu patients this season like a theoretical smallpox outbreak, you could get staff in the habit of isolating contagious patients now. Instead of leaving flu patients in the waiting room where they will expose other people, try moving them into pre-determined isolation areas like you would for a smallpox outbreak. Not only does this exercise give you an idea about the amount of people who arrive at your hospital with such a disease, but also tests your surge capacity plans, too.
If, in doing these exercises, you can theoretically learn how to better respond against smallpox, then you already learned an immense amount, stresses Irwin Gelman, PhD, a former infectious disease specialist at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, who now researches cancer genetics at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, NY.
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