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.
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