Making Room for Isolation Patients

The state of Texas, after a visit from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last fall, designated Texas Children’s Hospital as a pediatric Ebola treatment center.

In designing the unit, the Texas Children’s team incorporated many of the lessons learned from site visits to the two-bed isolation unit at Emory University Hospital and the five-bed (two if Ebola) bio-containment unit for Nebraska Medicine. Among those lessons:

-Unit flexibility is key for changing functionality.
-Communication between the care team is challenging in full isolation mode and must be considered.
-Protocol for family visitation is also challenging and varies based on situation.