60 Minutes show Sunday night with Dallas nurses that took care of Duncan
Last edited Tue Oct 28, 2014, 12:52 PM - Edit history (1)
I didn't watch the show, but they now have bits that apparently they didn't have in the show.
The 60 Minutes website has a rather moving "web extra" video of what apparently was not included in the show:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ebola-inside-the-first-united-states-diagnosis-thomas-eric-duncan/
I can't get any of the "related video" on the right hand side to work, but I did find a few bits on YouTube that weren't in the "web extra" and I don't know if they were part of Sundays' show or not since I didn't see it when it aired and can't find the full episode online:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/dandiamond/2014/10/26/60-minutes-just-broke-new-details-on-the-dallas-ebola-case-heres-what-they-revealed/
'60 Minutes' Just Broke New Details On The Dallas Ebola Case. Here's What They Revealed.
60 Minutes on Sunday told the story of a hospital tackling Ebola. A story of brave nurses and determined administrators. A story of heroes, frankly.
It was the story of Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas — the hospital that treated the first patient diagnosed with Ebola in the United States. A hospital that’s been widely criticized, since Texas Health nurses Nina Pham and Amber Vinson also got sick with Ebola.
You may think you know the details of what happened in Dallas. But 60 Minutes asks you to think again.
60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley sat down with four of the nurses who treated Thomas Duncan, the initial Ebola patient.
Here are four things we learned:
(snip)
= new reply since forum marked as read
He in particular really humanized the poor man and how terribly sick he was. I'm just so impressed with all of these people especially when they said that every single person volunteered to care/clean up after him from housekeeping staff to respiratory staff to nurses and doctors and just everyone.
. . . and was very moved by these nurses' experiences. What bothered me, however, was the way 60 Minutes conflated criticism of the hospital as an institution -- and I think there are many valid criticisms to be made in the handling of things by the institution as a whole -- with criticism of the heroic work of these nurses. Here is the text of a comment I posted to 60 Minutes' web site after watching the segment:
PM
There are many, many questions to be asked about, and many bases on which to fairly criticize, the response to Mr. Duncan's case, and I think "bungled" is a fair characterization of that response. Having said that, I don't think anyone is suggesting, or has suggested, that the efforts of doctors and nurses and other staff involved in the care of Mr. Duncan (or those involved in caring for any other Ebola patient) were/are anything other than heroic. But as a major hospital in a major U.S. city -- a city that is host to a huge international airport, no less -- there is little excuse for not having been better prepared for the possibility of having to treat an Ebola case. Certainly, serious questions must be asked concerning whether the CDC's guidelines, as they then existed, were in adequate. But merely pointing out that Texas Health Presbyterian was the first U.S. hospital to handle an Ebola patient fails to answer those questions, and fails to get Texas Health Presbyterian off the hook. It has been widely understood, in this age of international travel, that in the event of a major, uncontained outbreak in Africa, it would be a matter of when, not if, Ebola would arrive on our doorstep.
The heroics of the staff of Texas Health Presbyterian notwithstanding, the apparent lack of institutional procedures and protocols, the fact that the staff of the hospital found itself essentially flying by the seat of its pants, and questions as to whether Mr. Duncan's uninsured status may have led to less than rigorous evaluation of him during his first visit to Texas Health Presbyterian's emergency room, are all issues that should be rigorously examined. (The last of those, concerning the relationship between insured status and the level of diagnosis and treatment a patient receives, will likely be met with a bristling defensiveness by the hospital and its staff, but still must be examined. As someone who, a decade ago, experienced three gall bladder attacks over approximately 18 months, during a period in which I was uninsured, and was sent home from the emergency rooms of three Brooklyn hospitals, having undergone much of anything by way of diagnostics (two of the three didn't even draw blood to test) with a diagnosis of "gastritis" (a 50-cent word for stomach ache), I know all too well the differences in care and treatment received by insured versus uninsured patients in American hospitals. It was on a fourth attack, when I again had health insurance coverage, that my gall bladder problem was diagnosed and subsequently treated.)
But there were other failures, too, in the Dallas response -- so far, at least, it seems that the city has dodged a bullet (thank God) on those other failures -- having to do with the questions of why the family of Mr. Duncan, who had been in the same apartment with Mr. Duncan for at least four days while he was symptomatic, were forced to remain there, amid the contamination, while the city floundered about trying to locate other accommodations. Also, the city's failure to have prepared teams of workers in how to safely and effectively decontaminate the apartment Duncan had been staying in. By failing to raise, let alone seriously investigate, these questions, 60 Minutes has done its viewers a disservice.
