Logo Image
|Articles|November 1, 2018

Healthcare Worker Protection-The Key to Surviving The Next Respiratory Outbreak

Serious geopolitical and social forces are converging to create the conditions, on a scale unique in history, for a major respiratory pandemic. Prioritizing the protection of healthcare workers will be key to containing such a pandemic.

Protection of healthcare workers is key to containing and managing respiratory pandemics. Serious geopolitical and social forces are converging to create the conditions, on a scale unique in history, for a major respiratory pandemic.  When dealing with an outbreak of respiratory infection, the focus is on understanding disease transmission, and ensuring that appropriate personal protective equipment (PPE) is available and properly utilised by all at-risk staff. Few hospitals - let alone the broader responder community - are adequately equipped and ready to respond to a major respiratory pandemic.  In such a global crisis, the success of controlling such an outbreak in the initial phase will rely on the health and preparedness of healthcare teams.

Prioritising protection of healthcare workers from primary to regional hospitals can ensure a resilient frontline defense, and, in a respiratory outbreak the correct use of respiratory PPE is central to healthcare worker protection.  Recent experience of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), 2002 and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in 2015, highlighted the vulnerabilities around use and supply shortages of disposable respirators.

Commentators and industry experts are advising infection control teams to examine their PPE procedures and evaluate new re-useable respiratory protection devices in their preparations to protect staff and contain and manage an imminent public health crisis.

Sponsored by:

CleanSpace® Health & Safety is a specialist in design and manufacture of advanced personal respiratory protection equipment. CleanSpace Respirators are the lightest and smallest powered respirators in the world delivering high protection, comfort and cost effective respiratory protection solutions. Developed by leading biomedical engineers from the medical device industry who are specialists in positive pressure airflow control and mask design, CleanSpace respirators conform to the highest standards in safety, quality and reliability.  For more information www.cleanspacetechnology.com/healthusa

 

Download Whitepaper

Related to this article

View more
Infection preventionists in full PPE with children in DRC. (Image credit: author with AI)
Chasing the Bundibugyo Outbreak: How Static Numbers Hide a Moving Epidemic
Nearly 4 months into the DRC's Bundibugyo virus disease outbreak, some indicators suggest transmission may be slowing. But shifting hotspots, treatment-center capacity problems, community deaths, and incomplete surveillance data show why national case totals alone cannot determine whether containment has been achieved.
Read more
Health care workers from the US speaking with other health care workers in DRC. (Image credit: author with AI)
What Outbreak Metrics Can and Cannot Tell Us About the Ebola DRC Response
Is the Ebola outbreak in the DRC getting better? The answer depends on which numbers you examine. Several important indicators are moving in the right direction, including slower case growth and a declining Rₜ. But major gaps remain in contact tracing, testing, community deaths, safe burial coverage, and treatment capacity in some of the hardest-hit areas. ICT takes a deeper look at the latest outbreak data and why the numbers suggest cautious optimism, not victory.
Read more
Dyan Troxell, MSN, RN, director of clinical education at HandCraft Linen Services; J.J. Odom, MBA, CHESP, CMIP, T-CHEST, university director of buildings and grounds for UConn Health and chair-elect of the AHE Board; and Jenna Rivers, MPH, CPH, CIC, manager of infection prevention and control at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida.
At AHE Exchange26: Building Safer, Smarter Reusable Linen Programs
At AHE Exchange 2026, ICT spoke with experts representing commercial laundry services, EVS, and infection prevention about the systems behind a successful reusable linen program. They discuss linen quality, reject rates, unnecessary waste, frontline education, data, PAR levels, infection prevention oversight, and why strong relationships between health care facilities and their laundry providers matter.
Read more
A group of students raising their hands in class during a lecture (Adobe Stock 292282454 by Mediteraneo
Once a Teacher, Always a Teacher: Why Infection Prevention Is Education
How do you celebrate an infection that never happened? That's one of the unusual challenges infection preventionists share with teachers. Both can spend their careers changing outcomes they may never see. Both educate people who don't always want to listen. Both are second-guessed. Both face burnout. And both must somehow keep remembering why they started.
Read more