JOHN VELIS
BOSTON — Federal funding cuts have made it more difficult for the medical community to prepare for potential cases of Ebola, a Boston hospital official told state lawmakers yesterday.
The Legislature’s public health committee held a Statehouse hearing to assess the readiness of Massachusetts to deal with the virus that has infected thousands in West Africa. The state has not had any confirmed Ebola cases, but a recent scare in Braintree prompted the town’s mayor to call for improved state guidelines for handling any future emergencies.
In written testimony submitted to the panel, a union representing 23,000 nurses and health care workers argued the state was not as prepared for Ebola as officials, including Gov. Deval Patrick, have declared in public statements.
Dr. Paul Biddinger, chief of emergency preparedness at Massachusetts General Hospital, said recent federal funding cuts had impacted the ability of hospitals to train and equip their workers for public health crises. He cited a 38 percent decline in funding to hospitals for emergency readiness that health care facilities could use to hold training exercises and purchase protective clothing.
“These cuts threaten our nation’s health security,” Biddinger said.
Ebola, he warned, posed “fundamentally different” challenges to the U.S. health care system than any other disease because of its potential to disrupt hospital operations and the difficulty in relaying accurate information to patients, hospital staff and the public.
Biddinger told legislators that he was not aware of any state-level budget cuts that similarly impacted readiness.
The Massachusetts Nurses Association complained that its members had not been invited by the committee to share their concerns in person at the hearing. Rep. Jeffrey Sanchez, a Boston Democrat who co-chairs the panel, said nurses and other front-line health workers would be asked to appear at a follow-up session next week.
“We are not prepared. We are not trained,” said Patricia Powers, an emergency room nurse at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in an interview outside the hearing room. She noted that protective gear did not prevent two Dallas nurses who treated an Ebola patient from contracting the virus, and said she was unsure how she would perform her job while wearing the bulky suits.
“How do I protect myself? How do I protect the patient? How do I protect my family and the community?” Powers asked.
On Sunday, a man who said he had recently traveled to West Africa entered a walk-in clinic in Braintree, about 12 miles south of Boston, with symptoms that prompted fears he had Ebola. Later tests determined he did not.
Mayor Joseph Sullivan told the committee that while he was proud of the town’s response to the incident, it pointed to the need for stronger guidelines for municipalities suddenly thrust into a potential Ebola situation. He cited, among other things, spotty communication between first responders and state public health officials.
One of his biggest challenges was allaying anxiety among town residents during the emergency.
“We had to put out information as quickly as possible in order to calm fears,” Sullivan said.
Regarding the committee’s snub of the MNA leading up to the hearing, State Rep. John Velis, D-Westfield, said after the hearing that he had been contacted by the MNA a few days ago asking him to speak on their behalf to Chairman Sanchez.
“Let’s call it like it is: these frontline nurses are the first ones who come in contact (with sick patients) and they played an integral role today,” said Velis. “Their testimony was phenomenal.
“We quite literally have one of, if not the best, health care systems in the world,” Velis said. “But one thing that stuck out at me is that there is no uniformity right now.”
“A frontline nurse in Braintree or Natick isn’t going to be doing the same thing as a frontline nurse at Noble Hospital or Baystate or Mercy.” he said. “So what we need to do as legislators immediately is to provide that uniformity from guidance we’re getting from the CDC, the DPH and emergency response. There needs to be set guidelines – this is what you do when a person presents symptoms based on the best medical advice.”
Prior to the meeting, Velis said he would “scream bloody murder” if he felt western Massachusetts was being left out of the discussion and he said he was “absolutely irate” about the overwhelming focus on metro Boston and underwhelming presence of western Mass. hospitals at the hearing.
“The funds for training are paid for by the individual hospitals and in terms of allocating resources, I’m fine with it right now,” he said. “All the hospitals that were there were from east of 495. We need to make sure that all of the cutting edge medical technology gets dispersed if, God forbid, there was ever some type of an outbreak, because who is to say that it is not to happen in Springfield as opposed to Boston?”
Velis said that he made it “abundently clear” to the committee’s chairs that a western Mass. hospital should be present at next week’s hearing but added that he left Boston “very confident” in the state’s ability to halt a potential outbreak situation.
“Massachusetts is more than capable. In fact, you can make a plausible argument that Massachusetts is more equipped to handle it than any state in America,” said Velis. “My concern is that we see some of that cutting edge technology in western Mass., as well. We’ve got phenomenal hospitals in western Mass., but the problem is that this is such a rarified, unique virus, it’s not something we see a lot.”
“We need to make sure that our western Mass. RNs are getting the same type of training and preparedness as our friends in the eastern part of the state,” he said.
Velis said that the committee would begin searching for a way to make that up for federal funding cuts in the short term.
“There is no getting around it – we need to immediately come up with some sort of supplemental budget to obviously provide this type of training,” said Velis. “When it is a matter of life and death, what things cost tends not to matter.”
