Personal Protective Equipment Portraits Canada (PPC)-Humanization and surveying mask-wearing nationally.

Background: Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) Portraits is a hybridized art and medical intervention that lessens the alienating appearance of PPE through wearable, smiling headshot pictures. During the pandemic, the use of these portraits was expanded, but Canadian initiatives offered portraits only to immediate stakeholders. PPE Portraits Canada (PPC) aimed to provide PPE portraits to any Canadian healthcare institution and surveyed healthcare workers (HCW) regarding these portraits' impact.
Methods: University student volunteers founded PPC via online platforms and coast-to-coast collaborations that allowed any HCW nationwide to request a free portrait via an accessible online form. PPC has gathered feedback from participating HCWs directly via an anonymous and bilingual survey.
Results: 70% of HCWs wore their portraits "always" or "usually", 69% of HCWs "definitely would" recommend their portrait, 89.5% of HCWs found that the PPE portraits made a difference in their experiences with patients and 74% found the same for their colleagues. The pre- and post-effect of the portraits, led to a 37.5% greater likelihood that HCWs felt "connected" or "very connected" to patients/residents. For the thematic analysis, 70% or more of the comments were rated as positive, with less than 5% of comments being rated as negative.
Conclusion: This model's logistical framework can be expanded beyond PPE portraits to other initiatives with limited resources, allowing them to reach and positively impact diverse populations. HCW feedback was predominantly positive. The optimal design and impact of PPE portraits on patients and HCWs should be studied further to improve portrait adoption.
Competing Interests: This paper mentions several softwares and programs utilized by the authors and the PPE Portraits Canada organizing team. Both parties have benefitted from non-profit or COVID-19 response discounts and/or free premium subscriptions to use these programs at scale. However, these are non-exclusive and none of the authors have received any monetary compensation nor are they affiliated in any other way with the companies behind these products. Exceptionally, PPC received an exclusive sponsorship from a local printing sponsor in Montréal (The Business Box) that is mentioned in the article to receive PPE Portraits at cost. The authors are in no way obligated to mention these programs but are doing so to inspire others and facilitate the scaling of other initiatives. This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.
(Copyright: © 2024 Rendon et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)