The Massachusetts Department of Public Health's suggestion for a single Ebola treatment center in Boston is not sitting well with many local hospitals. They argue such a plan would prove burdensome and say it's better for multiple facilities to treat small numbers of patients.
The pushback is not without merit, says Dr. Stephen Calderwood – the infectious diseases chief at Massachusetts General Hospital.
"Because the capacity to each of the major academic centers is limited at the moment to care for patients, we need multiple hospitals available to make sure if there were more than one patient, for example, they could be safely cared for," Calderwood said.
Currently Mass. General is able to treat one adult and one pediatric patient infected with the Ebola virus. Calderwood says the hospital is working on training and renovations to be ready for a larger capacity. But he says while it’s good to have more hospitals doing such training, there are still concerns.
"If multiple hospitals are trying to prepare, then the same hospitals are both trying to do training, which detracts from the ability of health care workers to provide care elsewhere," he said.
Right now there are only four special isolation facilities in the U.S. equipped to provide around-the-clock Ebola care: the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, the University of Nebraska Medical Center and St. Patrick Hospital in Missoula, Mont. Three of them -- NIH, Emory, and the University of Nebraska -- have treated Ebola patients in recent months. Yet Calderwood says even their capacities are not much larger.
"Even amongst the three of those facilities, their current estimate is they could care for eight to ten patients, amongst all three of them together," he said.
Calderwood says that’s why it is important to prepare in case there are more patients than a single center could handle. But he doesn’t completely write off the idea of a regional facility.
"One of the things we always do in these bio-threats is when they pass, forget about this and don’t learn the lesson from it," he said. "So maybe we could be looking ahead and saying this won’t be the last, unfortunately, that we face; maybe we should really invest and build out in some more regional capacity."
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say they're looking to develop such regional treatment centers that can handle long-term care for Ebola patients. In Boston, Calderwood says that four or five such centers would be ideal.
