The Infection Control Today® personal protective equipment page offers written and video content on the proper use and—during the time of COVID-19 surges—reuse of PPE, including masks, respirators, gloves, gowns, face shields, goggles, and more. What are the proper donning and doffing methods? How long can PPE be extended? How are these items decontaminated? What comprises proper fit testing? Our experts will tell you.
April 30th 2024
Opinion: Kevin Kavanagh, MD, examines a summary of studies on how COVID-19 may damage the brain's frontal lobes, alter personality traits and cognitive functions, and potentially reshape society's dynamics.
Medical Crossfire®: Maximizing Patient Outcomes in Shingles – Are You Leveraging Guideline Based Care?
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Understanding RSV: What You Need to Know to Prevent and Treat Respiratory Syncytial Virus in Your Patients
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Respiratory Syncytial Virus: Understanding the Infection Burden and Anticipating the Impact of Vaccines
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Medical Crossfire®: Which Patients with Hematologic Malignancies are at Risk for Secondary Immunodeficiency (SID)… and How Can We Leverage Evidence to Improve Their Outcomes?
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Patient, Provider, and Caregiver Connection™: Prevention and Control of Meningococcal Disease — Individualizing Vaccine Recommendations in Adolescent Populations
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Q&A: What Infection Preventionists Learned from COVID
October 28th 2020Sharon Ward-Fore, MS, MT(ASCP), CIC: “I’m hoping that healthcare facilities will find the value in their infection preventionists and understand how important a role they play as far as training on PPE and disinfectants, and in hand hygiene, being kind of a boots on the ground people on the floor to see things firsthand.”
Not Thinking Outside the ‘Red Box’ Endangers Patients
October 22nd 2020When healthcare workers using the red box stepped into the patients’ rooms, there was “significantly increased non-compliance” with PPE and hand hygiene protocols compared to those healthcare workers who went into rooms without red boxes.
Innovations Needed for Personal Protective Equipment
October 9th 2020Perhaps now is the time that innovation begins to rely more heavily on infection preventionists and our valuable insight into the world of healthcare PPE. The changes we help guide now, can help make healthcare safer and infection prevention easier.
Infection Preventionists Need to Monitor PPE Use
August 27th 2020Sharon Ward-Fore, MS, MT(ASCP), CIC: “Practices drift. You can become complacent and maybe your level of awareness has decreased…. So, infection preventionists need to be really aware of what’s happening in the areas they cover as far as PPE usage is concerned.”
Q&A: ‘We’ve Never Been Here Before’ … Flu on Top of COVID
August 13th 2020Linda Spaulding, RN, BC, CIC, CHEC, CHOP: “Infection control people really have to monitor closely all respiratory viruses that are out there and be sure that you’re working actively with management to help put in place whatever needs to be put in place.”
Q&A: No Guarantee Healthcare Workers Will Take a COVID-19 Vaccine
July 14th 2020Mary Jean Ricci, MSN, RNBC: “There’s also the question of how do we encourage staff to get the vaccination, if there is a vaccination, for COVID-19? Currently, we have employees in facilities caring for patients who do not get the flu vaccine and don’t have a medical reason for not doing it…. I think that that’s a big area where infection control practitioners are going to have to focus their energy to encourage receiving the vaccination when this is over.”
Infection Preventionists Prepare to Ride the Second Wave of COVID
June 17th 2020Those of us in healthcare and infection prevention must focus on sustainable efforts to combat COVID-19. How do we maintain readiness and response without burnout? There’s no solid answer to this, but a big piece really goes into the establishment of plans and education.
COVID-19 Lesson: How IPs Can Ensure We Never Run Out of PPE Again
June 10th 2020In many cases, the relationship between IP and the supply chain department is passive and fluctuates with emergencies or new products. What if, though, we worked to have a more proactive relationship that involved weekly meetings regarding the level of supplies, like PPE?
How to Don, Doff Personal Protective Equipment During COVID-19 Pandemic
May 21st 2020Both donning and doffing are carefully laid out, but it’s the doffing part of the procedure that might present the most challenge because it involves the discarding of some of the PPE in a manner that most limits the chance of self-contamination or contaminating someone else.
Keeping the Supply Chain Intact in the Age of COVID-19
May 12th 2020For those working in healthcare, the relationship with the supply chain department was an increasingly important one. Between daily mask utilization and supply reporting to scrambling to find more supplies, those working in healthcare supply chains were working exceedingly hard to keep our heads above water.
China: 6 Healthcare Workers Die, 1716 Infected From Wuhan Coronavirus
February 14th 2020Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization, notes that this is the first time that China has included numbers of healthcare workers infected in the data it has provided on the spread of the epidemic.
Cardinal Health Recalls 9.1 Million Potentially Tainted Surgical Gowns
January 23rd 2020Siyang HolyMed in China, the vendor used by Cardinal Health to make the gowns, did so at 2 unapproved sites where the gowns were exposed to air particulate and other contaminants. Employees also ate in the production area.