Nurses union head: We weren’t ready for Ebola

Hospitals did not properly equip their staffers to deal with the intrusion of Ebola in the United States, the head of a nurses union said on Sunday, 

Speaking on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” National Nurses United co-president Jean Ross criticized healthcare officials for failing to listen to the nation’s nurses.

{mosads}“Yes, you cannot anticipate every possibility, but the nurses and other workers did anticipate what they needed before these errors occurred,” Ross said on the same day the Texas hospital that treated the first man diagnosed with the virus in the U.S. took out a full-page ad apologizing for its treatment of patient Thomas Eric Duncan and two nurses who cared for him and later contracted Ebola. “We have been saying for months we realize what it takes.”

“The nurses overwhelmingly told us this in the surveys: ‘We are not ready,’” she added. “So some of this could have been anticipated, and should have.”

The Dallas hospital that treated Duncan, the first patient diagnosed with Ebola in the country, on Sunday took out a full-page ad in The Dallas Morning News saying that it had “made mistakes in handling this very difficult challenge.”

“In short, despite our best intentions and skilled medical teams, we did not live up to the high standards that are the heart of our hospital’s history, mission and commitment,” Texas Health Resources CEO Barclay Berdan said in the full-page open letter.

“An apology is always nice, but a corporate CEO apology doesn’t save lives,” Ross responded on Sunday. “Where we go from here is to listen to us, which we have been begging for since the get-go.”