Mock medical drill prepares for the worst
A medical drill wrapped up Friday evening, testing readiness for handling patients with infectious diseases in Omaha.
Three "patients" arrived at Eppley Airfield. The scenario was that they're U.S. aid workers who have contracted an infectious disease and evacuated to Omaha.
What's different from the actual transfer of Ebola patients we saw two years ago? This time, the drill involved a bigger plane (747), which provides more logistical challenges than a smaller plane. Also this time, there were three patients arriving at once rather than just one.
"We know that getting one ambulance crew ready takes 30 minutes and what we've learned through the day, in testing our plan, is that it takes about an hour to get three crews ready at the same time as opposed to one," says John Lowe with Nebraska Medicine's Biocontainment Unit. "So we're not making any major tweaks to our adjustments to our plan, our approach, it was mainly about the allotment time"
It was just recently announced that Nebraska Medicine and UNMC will receive a $20 million federal grant to develop a national training and quarantine center for highly infectious diseases.
