The California Nurses Association is including Ebola in its contract negotiations with Kaiser Permanente—and using those contract demands to draw attention to broader problems in the country's healthcare system. Nurses want better training and protection in case they, like two nurses in Dallas, Texas, contract the disease while caring for a patient:
"We'd like to have an extra supplemental coverage, for specifically Ebola, if we were to contract Ebola while we're at work," says Diane McClure, a nurse at Kaiser Permanente's hospital in Sacramento, where a patient suspected of having Ebola was treated in August. He later tested negative for the virus.
She says even a month after the Ebola scare at her hospital, nurses hadn't received any meaningful hands-on training.
As the Texas case shows, nurses are one group of Americans with legitimate concerns about Ebola. They're going beyond Ebola panic to a systemic analysis of American health care, though:
Leaders from California's union and its partner in lobbying, National Nurses United, are quick to label the problems with training as a symptom of the country's fragmented health care system. The CDC issues guidelines, state departments of public health pass them on, then it's up to each hospital to take it from there.
The unions say fragmentation and a lack of protocols are the reasons two nurses at Dallas' Texas Health Presbyterian hospital were infected with Ebola.
These are reasonable concerns for diseases other than Ebola, though given the current news environment, Ebola is obviously a great way for the nurses to get attention for their broader concerns. And for nurses in hospitals that do end up seeing even a single Ebola patient, improved training, equipment, and supplemental insurance are reasonable asks.
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Of course, asking for better training and information is exactly the kind of sane response Republicans are trying to avoid as they
work to whip up panic over Ebola.