Ebola nurse will sue hospital
DALLAS — A 26-year-old nurse said in a newspaper interview that a hospital where she had worked in Dallas and its parent company failed her when she contracted Ebola while caring for the first person in the U.S. diagnosed with the deadly disease.
Nina Pham told The Dallas Morning News she is preparing to file a lawsuit Monday in Dallas County against Texas Health Resources. She said she continues to suffer from body aches and insomnia after contracting the disease from a patient she cared for last fall at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas.
Pham alleged the hospital’s lack of training and proper equipment and violations of her privacy made her “a symbol of corporate neglect — a casualty of a hospital system’s failure to prepare for a known and impending medical crisis.”
She also told the newspaper Texas Health Resources was negligent because it failed to develop policies and train its staff for treating Ebola patients.
She also told the paper the company did not have proper protective gear for those who treated Thomas Eric Duncan, who died after becoming the first person in the U.S. diagnosed with the disease stemming from an outbreak in West Africa. Duncan, who contracted the disease on a visit to his native Liberia, died last fall only days before Pham tested positive for the disease.
She told the paper she was frightened when Duncan tested positive for Ebola as panic and fear went throughout the hospital.
“I was the last person besides Mr. Duncan to find out he was positive,” she told the Morning News. “You’d think the primary nurse would be the first to know.”
Her attorney, Charla Aldous, told the paper Texas Health Resources “used Nina as a PR pawn.”
The Morning News said Wendell Watson, a spokesman for Texas Health Resources, declined to address specifics of Pham’s allegations.
