Carle's Ebola treatment center a go

 Urbana hospital is now home to one of the nation’s just over 5 dozen federally-designated Ebola treatment centers.

The risk of an Ebola outbreak in the U.S. is low, but the new unit at Carle Foundation Hospital unveiled Wednesday morning will double as a center that can also handle patients with other infectious diseases requiring isolation from the rest of the hospital, Carle officials said.

“When it’s needed, it’s here,” said Dr. Matthew Gibb, Carle’s chief medical officer.

The new unit was built in the hospital’s former cardiac intensive care unit, which has been unused space for the past several years. It includes two single-bed patient rooms, a dedicated lab and areas for its staff to both put on and take off protective gear.

While the virus that causes the potentially-fatal Ebola fever is largely spread through contact with blood and other body fluids of an infected patient, the center’s two negative-pressure isolation rooms will keep the air in those rooms from circulating in the rest of the hospital. Alarms are sounded if a door to a patient room remains open longer than it would reasonably take for caregivers to go in and out.

The patient rooms also include communication equipment so isolated patients can talk to visitors and Carle staff members who aren’t inside the designated area, according to Amy Bandy, director of hospital operations and surgical services and part of the treatment center’s leadership team.

The dedicated lab space is further intended to prevent the risk of contamination outside this unit, she said.

Carle asked medical personnel who have been trained to staff this new unit to volunteer for this duty, rather than being assigned, because of the added risk they’d be taking on, according to Dr. Robert Healy, chief medical quality officer. The response from those who stepped up has been “overwhelming,” he said.

Carle’s center was two years in the making, as leaders there questioned whether the Urbana hospital would be prepared to handle infectious disease cases of the Ebola magnitude, Healy said.

When there were new cases of Ebola virus infection in the U.S. a few years ago, the federal government had asked all hospitals to provide some level of preparedness to treat the Ebola patients.

The three established levels of hospital care include front-line hospitals that can keep and isolate someone with suspected Ebola, assessment center hospitals that can keep a suspected Ebola patient for four days while Ebola test results are pending, and treatment centers such as the one at Carle that can care for patients with confirmed Ebola.

Gibb said he sees the new center as a mission-driven initiative. Carle is the area’s safety-net hospital, he saidNot only that, Carle is also in a community that could be at enhanced risk of infectious disease cases because of its location at the cross-section of major interstates and the international travel and student population at the University of Illinois, he said.

Carle received a $500,000 federal grant for start-up and construction of the center, and is also receiving ongoing operational funding, Gibb said.

The process for getting Carle’s treatment center approved included two site visits from national and state experts, who recommended Carle for a final review with an assessment arm of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The addition of Carle brings the total number of Ebola treatment centers in Illinois to four, with the other three in the Chicago area. Others are at Rush University Medical Center, Northwestern Memorial Hospital and Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital, according to the Illinois Department of Public Health. There are 63 of these treatment centers nationally