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In that time frame we were very worried about moving as quickly
as possible.
[SOUND] The feeling was that this was
a national health crisis and we had to do our part.
>> They started demolition when we were
still working on drawing.
So this was real time, point and shoot.
Here's the sketch.
Here's the drawings, here's what we know so far.
Here's the next layer of information which results
in changes.
Everything needs to be treated with that sort of
NASA approach to process.
>> From the initial days of the Ebola preparations,
it was clear to hospitals throughout the United States
that each hospital needed to be prepared.
The reality hit home that a bio-containment unit separate
from normal clinical operations would be a great asset.
>> Patient beds here, would be bed number one.
If we ever had a patient, this is where they'd be centered.
It's a little larger room that's made to accommodate a second
patient if it were a relative or
something, you could see they share the same airspace.
>> We realized that this type of unit would lend itself for
any highly infectious disease.
>> We have a responsibility to stay
current with what's happening in health care.
We are in a situation where we have to keep changing our
facilities and bringing in new technology, in order to keep up,
and in order to support the physicians and
the nurses who do the wonderful thing here.
>> The safety of the hospital and
the patients at large were the number one concern.
And so we worked very closely with Hospital Epidemiology and
Infection Control to ensure that we had the appropriate standards
in place.
>> It was a very proud moment to see how many people at our
institution came forward to join this team.
>> So I'm gonna take everybody on a quick tour of the unit, and
then we're gonna break you up into groups.
>> There are a countless number of individuals who provided
support, both to provide the capacity for care, to build the
personnel support so that other providers can step away from
their other responsibilities and come into the unit.
>> Part of the training was hiring a nurse educator for
the bio containment unit.
She's our subject matter expert when it comes to PPE and
infection control.
And she also communicates with the expectations of
the infection that we're dealing with at the time.
>> Because the message to the institution is that
you're not gonna have to worry where that cart was.
Was it up on the BCU?
Is it clean?
Those types of things.
It's not leaving here.
>> The urgency of the situation became very clear,
and everyone accelerated their preparations,
and I think that our biocontainment unit,
the way that it is designed, and the way our team is being
trained is positioned to really lead this field going forward.
>> One of the most incredible experiences in building
the bio-containment unit has been the spirit of collaboration
and the multidisciplinary support that we've had from
every part of the hospital.
If you can name the service, they have been involved in
helping us build this capacity, and we could not have done
it without every part of this hospital system.
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>> What I took away from this experience was just how
impressive it was that there's this group of clinicians who
hadn't worked together before that gelled so quickly.
>> We can be very proud of our organization,
of our institution, and the leaders who really stepped
forward bravely into that space saying this was consistent with
the mission of our organization and really a role that we wanted
to play both for patient care as well as for the training and
potentially research down the road of how to safely prepare
and care for patients with highly infectious diseases.
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