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After Ebola, Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Rebounded

Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas on Oct. 1, 2014.

Dallas faced an unprecedented public health scare in the fall of 2014 when a Liberian national was diagnosed with the Ebola virus. KERA is exploring lessons learned – and taking a deeper look at what happened last year – in anew series called Surviving Ebola.

Explore the KERA digital project here. There’s a timeline of Ebola-related events, voices of those most affected by the virus, and much more.

Today, we’ll look at the hospital hardest hit from the Ebola scare – the hospital that treated Thomas Eric Duncan. For the month of October 2014, revenue at Texas Health Presbyterian in Dallas declined more than $12 million. In November, revenue was down $8 million.

People didn’t want to go near the “Ebola” hospital.

Dr. Alexandra Dresel is a surgeon with a private practice at the Presbyterian complex. Even though her office, a warm sixth floor suite, isn’t inside the actual hospital, Dresel found herself trying to calm patients down, trying to talk them off the ledge. They still canceled.

“The practice basically came to a screeching halt,” Dresel said.

Read the rest of the story here.

Photo credit: Jim Tuttle/The Dallas Morning News

Lauren Silverman was the Health, Science & Technology reporter/blogger at KERA News. She was also the primary backup host for KERA’s Think and the statewide newsmagazine  Texas Standard. In 2016, Lauren was recognized as Texas Health Journalist of the Year by the Texas Medical Association. She was part of the Peabody Award-winning team that covered Ebola for NPR in 2014. She also hosted "Surviving Ebola," a special that won Best Long Documentary honors from the Public Radio News Directors Inc. (PRNDI). And she's won a number of regional awards, including an honorable mention for Edward R. Murrow award (for her project “The Broken Hip”), as well as the Texas Veterans Commission’s Excellence in Media Awards in the radio category.