This past month has been a busy and exciting one for the Biocontainment Unit! On Tuesday, August 16, our colleagues at Lifeline, with the support of HEIC, conducted a successful transport drill with the military from Andrews Air Force Base to Walter Reed Medical Center. We are so grateful to our partners at Lifeline and HEIC for all that they do to ensure we are prepared and able to transport patients with highly infectious diseases and thrilled that they can share this expertise nationally.
To see footage of the drill, visit: https://www.facebook.com/AirForceMedicalService/videos/1280381468639270/
In addition, the BCU held a no-notice drill on Wednesday, August 17 to test our communication and scheduling systems. An after-action review allowed our team to debrief and discuss areas where things worked smoothly, as well as areas we can improve our notifications to our staff and how they should respond. We look forward to applying what we learned from this drill moving forward.
This past Friday, August 19, the BCU also had the pleasure of hosting Patricia Tennill as a part of our Biocontainment Unit Lecture Series. Trish is the lead nurse of the Special Pathogens Program and assistant director of nursing at Bellevue Hospital in New York. Her talk was entitled “The Importance of Quarterly Training and Nursing Engagement.” The staff enjoyed hearing about the experiences of caring for a patient with Ebola virus disease and learned much about Bellevue’s infectious disease history, how to keep staff engaged and the significance of nursing leadership. After Trish’s talk, we hosted our quarterly staff meeting where we discussed training updates, progress on our ongoing research projects, results from our provider engagement survey and suggestions for future seminar topics and speakers. A huge thank you to Trish for coming down from New York and thanks to everyone who joined us!
