1. Personal Protective Equipment in COVID-19
- Author
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Xinming Li, Yuxuan He, Bin Zheng, Kritika Taparia, Hongzhi Sun, Junling Yang, and Xiaoqin Duan
- Subjects
Work related injuries ,medicine.medical_specialty ,Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) ,Cross-sectional study ,business.industry ,education ,Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health ,Clinical performance ,030210 environmental & occupational health ,Occupational medicine ,03 medical and health sciences ,0302 clinical medicine ,Family medicine ,Epidemiology ,Health care ,medicine ,business ,Personal protective equipment - Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To assess impact of personal protective equipment (PPE) on healthcare providers (HCPs) in caring for COVID-19 patients. METHODS: A cross-sectional survey was conducted over 50 hospitals in China. Descriptive analyses and Chi-square tests were performed on the collected data. RESULTS: All 104 frontline HCPs report negative impacts of PPE on their clinical performance, 97% of them experienced discomfort and injuries caused by wearing PPE for long hours. Frontline HCPs provided suggestions to alleviate the negative impacts and to enhance communication between healthcare staff and patients. Two hundred eighty two non-frontline HCPs also revealed similar problems; however, we recorded a few discrepancies between answers given by frontline and non-frontline HCPs. CONCLUSIONS: Wearing PPE for long hours degrades health performance. Measures were suggested to improve the design of PPE for protecting HCPs and enhancing their services to COVID patients.
- Published
- 2020