Dallas nurse sues after Ebola ordeal
Lawsuit claims hospital lied to Congress about training
DALLAS – The Dallas hospital that treated the first patient to be diagnosed in the U.S. with Ebola lied to Congress when it said its staff was trained to handle the deadly virus, a nurse who contracted the disease contends in a lawsuit filed Monday.
Nina Pham, who was an intensive care unit nurse at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas, says after being told last fall that she would be treating a patient suspected of having Ebola, “the sum total” of information she was given to protect herself was “what her manager ‘Googled’ and printed out from the Internet.”
She says in her lawsuit that the day after getting that information, the patient, Thomas Eric Duncan, tested positive for the disease. Duncan, who contracted Ebola in his native Liberia but started showing symptoms during a trip to the U.S., died at the hospital. Pham, 26, and another nurse who treated Duncan, Amber Vinson, contracted the disease but recovered.
In a statement released through her lawyers, Pham said she felt she had no choice but to sue the hospital’s parent company, Texas Health Resources. “I was hoping that THR would be more open and honest about everything that happened at the hospital, and the things they didn’t do that led to me getting infected with Ebola,” she said.
Wendell Watson, a company spokesman, said Texas Health Resources is optimistic that the matter can be resolved. He would not address allegations in the lawsuit about statements a hospital official made to Congress.
The lawsuit describes a chaotic situation at the hospital, where nurses scrambled to decide what kind of personal protective equipment to wear “without any formal guidance or training” from their supervisors. The lawsuit says Texas Health Resources “wholly failed to ensure that appropriate policies, procedures, and equipment were in place.”
Clear dropcloths were taped to the ceiling and walls of the hallway to create a makeshift containment facility, nurses had to dispose of hazardous waste – a job they weren’t trained for – and hazardous material placed in the room next to Duncan’s was allowed to pile up, the lawsuit alleges.
Pham also accuses Dr. Daniel Varga, the chief clinical officer and a senior executive vice president for Texas Health Resources, of making “numerous patently false statements” in testimony he gave to a congressional subcommittee. She says he falsely claimed that the hospital was trained to manage Ebola and that he misrepresented the type of protective equipment that nurses wore while caring for Duncan.