1918 Redux: Supportive Nursing Care for the Coronavirus Pandemic Is Courageous Care

Litter carriers at Red Cross Emergency Ambulance Station in Washington, D.C., during influenza pandemic of 1918.

The lessons of the past.

As we struggle to make sense of unfolding data, announcements, and public health directives about the current coronavirus pandemic, appreciating the lessons from past pandemics can help us understand the effectiveness and challenges related to quarantines and social isolation, as well as the need for reliable and timely communications.

In times of public health uncertainty, nurses and nursing care have played a critical role in saving lives and relieving suffering. We now know a great deal about the role of nursing during the 1918 influenza pandemic. Some lessons need heeding now.

Historian Nancy Bristow’s American Pandemic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) presents the historical facts clearly. For example, public health officials’ 1918 prohibitions on public gatherings, the sharing of such (then) new personal items as toothbrushes, and school attendance and religious services met acceptance as well as resistance. […]

Addressing Nurses’ Urgent Concerns About Ebola and Protective Equipment

By Betsy Todd, MPH, RN, CIC, AJN clinical editor. (See also her earlier post, “Ebola: A Nurse Epidemiologist Puts the Outbreak in Perspective.”)

This is not a time to panic. It is a time to get things right.—John Nichols, blogging for the Nation, 10/12/2014

Scanning electron micrograph of filamentous Ebola virus particles budding from an infected VERO E6 cell (35,000x magnification). Credit: NIAID Scanning electron micrograph of filamentous Ebola virus particles budding from an infected VERO E6 cell (35,000x magnification). Credit: NIAID

For years, nurses have tolerated increasingly cheap, poorly made protective gear—one result of health care’s “race to the bottom” cost-cutting. Now the safety of personal protective equipment (PPE) is being hotly debated as the Ebola epidemic spills over into the U.S.

If all nurses had access to impermeable gowns that extended well below the knee (and could be securely closed in back, had real cuffs, and didn’t tear easily); faceguards that completely shielded; N95 respirator masks that could be properly molded to the face; and disposable leg and shoe covers, we might not be having the same conversation. Yet how much protection can we count on from the garb we now have available, especially considering the minimal donning and doffing training given to most nurses?

While there […]

Ebola: A Nurse Epidemiologist Puts the Outbreak in Perspective

By Betsy Todd, MPH, RN, CIC, AJN clinical editor

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