Ebola diaries: Changing health worker culture WHO

WHO                                                                                                 April 10, 2015
"The Ebola Diaries" is a series of first-person accounts describing what it has been like working on the front lines of a global health crisis of unprecedented proportions.

Dr Cota Vallenas talks about her experiences in the early days of the Ebola outbreak as an expert in infection prevention and control. She reminds us that health-care workers are among the most vulnerable and a cultural change is needed around self-protection to ensure these frontline workers don’t become infected.

It was Spring Break in the United States and WHO infection prevention and control (IPC) expert Dr Constanza (Cota) Vallenas was visiting her sons in New York. In late March 2014, she began seeing emails from WHO epidemiologist, Dr Pierre Formenty, about an outbreak of Ebola virus disease (EVD) in Guinea. Although a French-speaking IPC specialist had been deployed, more were needed. On 4 April, she was deployed to Guinea to train health-care professionals in IPC practices that would prove critical to the health and safety of hundreds of frontline workers.

Excerpt:

...For Cota, one of the biggest lessons learned was the "need to focus more on routine care and protecting health workers. This is a total change in culture. There hasn’t been a culture of self-protection, and changing that won’t be easy." She believes no cost should be spared in finding innovative clinical management tools and PPE that ensures the safety of workers while delivering compassionate care.

"I realized these health workers are very vulnerable. Many are poor people — professionals, of course — but just from the community. No one is taking care of them. They know about protective measures, but they didn’t have the training nor the PPE. They didn’t have the resources to practice self-protection."

Read complete diary.
http://www.who.int/features/2015/ebola-diaries-vallenas/en/