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Introduction to Special Issue on Highly Communicable Disease Management.

In the autumn of 2014, the limited spread of ebola virus disease (EVD) outside the countries of origin sparked worldwide fear of a global epidemic. Regrettably, the response of the developed world to this disease was inmany respects “too little too late” for victims of the disease in West Africa. However, it did galvanize attention on the need to prepare many new sites for the prospect of treating patients with EVD while protecting healthcare personnel. As noted inmy editorial in the December 2014 issue of Simulation in Healthcare, even in late 2014, our community of simulation in healthcare was seeing the use of our techniques to assist and amplify these preparations. Last year, we issued a call for papers for a partial/full theme issue of Simulation in Healthcare about the general topic of the use of simulation for education, training, and systems probing to address “highly communicable diseases.” We received numerous submissions, each of which underwent the journal's standard review processes. Although nearly all of the submissions described laudable activities, we ultimately accepted six for this theme issue. They were chosen because of their scholarship, relative novelty or interest, and for diversity of approach and geographic site of care. We asked Drs Steven J. Lisco and Jennifer J. Adams, experts on managing EVD and other highly communicable diseases in a highly specialized permanent clinical unit, to provide an editorial discussing the articles and to put them into a broader context. As I predicted in 2014 and as amplified by Drs Lisco and Adams, even though the “aftershocks” of this wave of EVDmay have finally dissipated, the lessons learned need to be retained by the simulation community (and our clinical peers) because there will always be unanticipated challenges from highly communicable diseases or other global threats that will need us to deploy special skills in rapid and widespread fashion. We hope that our readers will enjoy this theme issue, learn from the approaches of others, and heed the cautionary tales for application in the future.