Angela Hewlett, MD, discussing working with the media during Ebola

13 February 2023

Angela Hewlett: [O]ur main outreach, though, was actually through the media, which I would say was something that we really did right here in 2014. And the reason I say that is because we have some really amazing people in our public relations department here both at UNMC and Nebraska Medicine. And they originally in 2014, when we were accepting our patients and even prior to that actually, when we—when the Ebola outbreak was escalating and we knew that we would probably be a potential site to receive patients, our PR group really said, “We're going to be very transparent. We're going to tell people what's going on. [Laughs] We're not going to hide anything. And that way we're going to make sure that they trust us and that we're doing the right thing.” And I think they kept that mantra throughout all of our care and even now. Just making sure that we're out there and that—we met—I mean, we had media appearances every day or almost every day at least while we were caring for patients with Ebola. There were multiple of those appearances, both local, national, and international as well. We had people from CNN here. We had people from national NBC News here doing different interviews and things like that with our team. We also enlisted—so Phil and I did a lot of that, but we also had other team members that also did these different interviews to talk about from the nursing standpoint or from the lab standpoint or the critical care doctor that cared for the patients. And so, we did a lot of press conferences. So the way that we really reached the public was through the media, and that was both print, TV, internet, I mean, anything at the time. And I do think that that really helped us to—and it helped people. There were definitely people who were concerned, and understandably, about receiving these types of patients here in Omaha. But what we needed to say is, “We—these patients are coming to the US. We have a facility here that is unlike really any other—with the exception of maybe two in the United States—in that we can protect—we can take care of these patients, we can protect our healthcare workers, we can protect our community. And so, this is exactly where you want these patients to be cared for.”

From the McGoogan Health Sciences Library Special Collections and Archives