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Showing results for tags 'PPE (personal Protective Equipment)'.
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Content ArticleThe purpose of wearing a type II fluid resistant surgical mask (FRSM) during surgical and invasive procedures is to minimise the transmission of pathogens in the nose, mouth and throat of staff to patients. They also protect staff from splash or spray of blood/body fluids onto their respiratory mucosa (nose and mouth). A wide range of FFP3 respirators have been used as protection by staff across healthcare settings during the COVID-19 pandemic, including FFP3 respirators with and without exhalation valves. The exhalation valves do not filter exhaled breath, even when of a ‘shrouded’ type. Current infection control guidance states that: “Valved respirators should not be worn by a healthcare worker/operator when sterility directly over the surgical field is required, eg in theatres/surgical settings or when undertaking a sterile procedure”. Powered hoods (also known as powered air purifying respirators or PAPRs) have been provided as respiratory protective equipment (RPE) for staff unable to achieve a tight fit with an FFP3 respirator(s). The air exiting PAPR hoods is not filtered. Incident reports received since March 2020 identified five incidents describing dripping of condensation from the exhalation valve of an FFP3 respirator, potentially compromising the sterile field; one cerebral abscess involving an oral bacterium linked to the use of a valved FFP3 respirator during brain surgery; and three cases of endocarditis linked to PAPR use during cardiac surgery. These incident reports and feedback from services suggest that the risks of valved respirators and PAPRs for surgical and invasive procedures is not well recognised, and that their use may have become routine in some theatre environments.
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Content ArticleIn this webinar discussion, an expert panel discusses the airborne nature of Covid-19, the lack of adequate personal protective equipment (PPE) during the pandemic and continued concerns around unsafe PPE guidance and the impact on both staff and patient safety. The panel includes: Helen Hughes: Chief Executive of Patient Safety Learning Dr David Tomlinson: Consultant Cardiologist, NHS Rachael Moses OBE: Consultant Physiotherapist, NHS Hosted by Dr Asad Khan and produced by Gez Medinger.
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Content ArticleScientists around the world have warned of the airborne nature of Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic, but how does this impact on patient safety and what can be done to reduce risk? In this long read blog, GP trainee Lindsay Fraser-Moodie, describes how she witnessed the impact of poor ventilation and inadequate PPE on staff and patient safety while working on a hospital ward during the second UK Covid-19 wave. Lindsay describes how her CEO welcomed her concerns, and the changes that were put in place to reduce the risk of hospital acquired transmission. This article includes a comment from her CEO David Carter, who highlights the challenges of the situation and praises Lindsay for her approach to patient safety.
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Content ArticleIn this blog, James Perry a GP for Primary Care Wirral GP Federation, describes his experience of being a member of the UK's first multidisciplinary quarantine unit in 40 years. Starting from when 83 British nationals arrived in the UK from Wuhan, China and were transferred to Arrowe Park on the morning of 31st January, he details several operational and medical approaches, including how the multidisciplinary team had to create a strategic operational plan and how the mental health team aimed to promote a normalising, practical and human approach without medicalising people’s natural responses to a challenging and unusual circumstance.
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- Infection control
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Content ArticleDo masks work? Why do some people claim they don’t work? Do they cause harm? What kinds of masks should we wear? How does masking need to change now we know that Covid is airborne? When can we stop wearing them? In this long-read Twitter thread Trisha Greenhalgh, Professor of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford, outlines the data.
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Content ArticleThis Lancet article argues that the UK Government's plan to lift almost all COVID-19 restrictions on 19 July 2021 is a mistake, setting out five main concerns in this regard.
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- Public health
- Infection control
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Content ArticleThis set of slides, developed by Dr Gillian Higgins for MedSupplyDrive UK, can be used by health and social care workers to advocate for better PPE protection locally.
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Content ArticleIn addition to older individuals and those with underlying chronic health conditions, maternal and newborn populations have been identified as being at greater risk from COVID-19. It became critical for hospitals and clinicians to maintain the safety of individuals in the facility and minimise the transmission of COVID-19 while continuing to strive for optimised outcomes by providing family-centered care. Rapid change during the pandemic made it appropriate to use the plan–do–study–act (PDSA) cycle to continually evaluate proposed and standard practices. Patrick and Johnson describe how their team established an obstetric COVID-19 unit for women and newborns, developed guidelines for visitation and for the use of personal protective equipment, initiated universal COVID-19 testing, and provided health education to emphasize shared decision making.
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Content ArticleIn this article for the Patient Safety Network, the authors highlight ways in which the Covid-19 pandemic initiated drastic modifications to the way in which health services are delivered across care settings, in particular in hospital emergency departments and inpatient units. They examine particular challenges highlighted by patient safety organisations (PSOs), including increases in safety incidents relating to pressure sores, sepsis, infections and communication issues. The article also highlights innovations to support safety that have been developed during the pandemic.
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- Patient safety incident
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Content ArticleThere is no longer any scientific doubt about how Covid spreads through the air. Covid spreads like any other airborne respiratory disease. The virus is carried in tiny particles called aerosols, which we breathe out constantly — especially when speaking loudly or singing. The particles stay in the room air like smoke, and if someone has Covid, their exhaled aerosols contain the virus and can infect someone who breathes them in. We stop the disease spreading by stopping people inhaling infected aerosol. In this article for the Guardian, Dr Adam Squires and Prof Christina Pagel detail what we can do to protect ourselves from the airborne spread of Covid. “Filtering facepiece respirator” masks, social distancing and opening windows are short term solutions. Additionally, much can be done by cleaning the air in the room, removing infectious aerosol before it can be inhaled through ventilation and supplement the clean air by filtering out the respiratory aerosol particles using small portable HEPA (“High Efficiency Particle Air”) filter unit.. Longer term, new developments in ultraviolet (UV) technology can safely and efficiently kill airborne pathogens in large spaces such as canteens, gyms or theatre. Infrastructure upgrades and new builds, necessary for zero carbon targets, can combine more energy-efficient ventilation with filtration to lower pollution. In the classroom and the workplace, clean fresh air has wider benefits on health and wellbeing far beyond our current airborne pandemic.
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Content ArticleIn this article for The Conversation, the authors discuss their latest research findings regarding Covid-19 transmission, outlining the likelihood of catching Covid-19 in different indoor and outdoor scenarios. They demonstrate that speaking, shouting, singing and heavy exercise all increase the likelihood of transmission, and illustrate the impact of ventilation, face coverings and number of people on the risk of catching the virus. The article includes an table summarising their findings and a link to the Covid-19 Aerosol Transmission Estimator developed by the authors. View the full research paper
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- Pandemic
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Content ArticleThis poster from the Royal College of Midwives (RCM) provides information for midwives and midwife support workers on appropriate PPE for different scenarios in maternity care. It covers what to wear in different stages of care in both hospital and community settings if a patient has, or does not have, confirmed or suspected Covid-19.
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- Staff safety
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Content ArticleIn this HSJ article, workforce correspondent Annabelle Collins looks at the workforce issues facing the NHS as the Omicron variant of Covid-19 spreads rapidly across the UK. She highlights that staff absences are at their highest since March 2020, with the situation particularly worrying in London, where 1 in 13 doctors are currently off sick. The author discusses the role of PPE in protecting staff and reducing absences and quotes Patient Safety Learning's Chief Executive Helen Hughes, who highlights "inconsistencies" in the UK approach, saying the IPC guidance needs to be “urgently updated” so HEPA/FPP3 masks are provided for NHS staff, in line with World Health Organization recommendations: “Today the World Health Organisation is issuing updated guidance for health workers, recommending the use of either a respirator or a medical mask, in addition to other personal protective equipment, when entering a room where there is a patient with suspected or confirmed covid.” The article also examines the government's lack of workforce plans and the Treasury’s unwillingness to publish workforce predictions, despite repeated calls for them over the past few years.
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- Staff safety
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Content ArticleThis toolkit published by the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) aims to support healthcare professionals to consider and manage risks associated with the transmission of respiratory infections, specifically Covid-19. It is designed to aid local decision making about the level of personal protective equipment (PPE) required to protect healthcare professionals while at work.
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- Risk assessment
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Content ArticleWhen the pandemic began, many nations’ emergency stockpiles came into the spotlight—and were found wanting. Twenty months later, Jane Feinmann asks what happened, and if procurement has got any better.
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- Commisioning
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Content ArticleWhen Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge upgraded its face masks for staff working on COVID-19 wards to filtering face piece 3 (FFP3) respirators, it saw a dramatic fall – up to 100% – in hospital-acquired SARS-CoV-2 infections among these staff. Healthcare workers – particularly those working on COVID-19 wards – are much more likely to be exposed to coronavirus, so it’s important we understand the best ways of keeping them safe The findings are reported by a team at the University of Cambridge and Cambridge University Hospitals (CUH) NHS Foundation Trust. The research has not yet been peer-reviewed, but is being released early because of the urgent need to share information relating to the pandemic.
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- Virus
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Content ArticleThis report, published by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) in the United States, presents findings from a review of 5,500 patient safety records in which the Covid-19 public health emergency was included as part of the description of the event or unsafe condition. It forms part of a series of Network of Patient Safety Databases Data Spotlight reports.
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Content ArticleA post on Doctors in Unite website argue that COVID-19 guidelines are fundamentally flawed and not fit for purpose, putting health care workers and patients at serious risk. IPC authorities are increasingly isolated in their view that COVID-19 is spread by droplets and not through the air, a position which is directly contradicted now by official government policy. This article takes a more detailed look at the issues, which demonstrates how unscientific, out of touch and indeed hazardous the guidelines are for health workers and patients.
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Content ArticleThe emergence of the omicron variant has raised concerns that the pandemic is not yet over. In this BMJ opinion piece, William et al. outline four key lessons that governments need to learn from to protect against future pandemics
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Content ArticleWearing face masks and maintaining social distance are familiar to many people around the world during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Evidence suggests that these are effective ways to reduce the risk of COVID-19 infection. However, it is not clear how exactly the risk of infection is affected by wearing a mask during close personal encounters or by social distancing without a mask. Results from a study by Bagheri et al. show that face masks significantly reduce the risk of COVID-19 infection compared to social distancing. We find a very low risk of infection when everyone wears a face mask, even if it doesn’t fit perfectly on the face.
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- PPE (personal Protective Equipment)
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Content ArticleUsing a number of analytical approaches, this working paper from the World Health Organization (WHO) attempts to estimate the global number of deaths in health and care workers due to Covid-19. It includes a breakdown of deaths by WHO region and country. It demonstrates that data reported to WHO has greatly underestimated the scale of infection and death among health and care workers, and calls for targeted approaches to increasing vaccination uptake in health and care workers worldwide.
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- Pandemic
- Staff safety
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Content ArticleThis is the second of a short series of blogs in which we take a look back at our work in five areas of patient safety during 2021. In this blog, we look at our work to highlight key patient and staff safety issues resulting from the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Through our work, Patient Safety Learning seeks to harness the knowledge, insights, enthusiasm and commitment of health and social care organisations, professionals and patients for system-wide change and the reduction of avoidable harm. We believe patient safety is not just another priority; it is a core purpose of health and social care. Patient safety should not be negotiable.
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- Pandemic
- Long Covid
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Content ArticleAn author turned junior doctor’s account of the chaos at work and anguish at home as Covid-19 arrived in the UK.
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- GP
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Content ArticleOn the 15 May 2020, John Skinner was admitted to Watford Hospltal suffering from a tonic clonlc seizure. He had a background of cannabis usage and a subdural empyema in 2020 that had left him with epilepsy. On arrival at hospital he again had another tonic clonlc seizure and focal seizures. The Junior doctor Instructed to administer the drug sought advice from a more senior doctor as to the dose to be administered. As a result of a failure In verbal communication between the doctors, aggravated as both were masked, a dose of 15 mg/kg was heard as 50 mg/kg and an overdose was administered. He was given 3600 mg of phenytoln. He arrested within 16 minutes and died and could not be revived.
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Content ArticleThis qualitative study in Antimicrobial Resistance & Infection Control aimed to identify institutional actions, strategies and policies related to healthcare workers’ safety perception during the early phase of the Covid-19 pandemic at a tertiary care centre in Switzerland. The authors interviewed healthcare workers from different clinics, professions, and positions. The study identified transparent communication as the most important factor affecting healthcare worker's safety perceptions during the first wave. This knowledge can be used to help hospitals better prepare for future infectious disease threats and outbreaks.
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- Staff safety
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