List 5 types of personal protective equipment (PPE) that might be used in a medical situation.
List 5 types of personal protective equipment (PPE) that might be used in a medical situation.
LO 03.05 – Summarize the guidelines for the use of personal protective equipment.
Career Relevancy
When it comes to asepsis, it’s not all about cleaning the surrounding areas. It’s also about keeping your body covered and protected from the contaminants that you’ll come into contact with every day. In this way, personal protective equipment (PPE) plays a vital role in infection control and prevention. From goggles to face masks to aprons, this equipment will help keep your body safe from infectious agents. As a medical assistant, you need to understand what equipment is needed when you are interacting with a young patient with a common cold or helping perform surgery on patients with hepatitis—and everything in between. Knowing how to use PPE will keep you from being exposed to infectious material, non-infectious but hazardous material, and disease.
Background
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Luca is a new medical assistant at Stonehill Community Clinic. He loves his new job, and he feels like he’s learning a ton. Through first-hand experiences, education, and instruction from his supervisor, he’s fully immersing himself in this work and applying all his new skill sets. It’s been a whirlwind, but his colleagues are recognizing his commitment to providing the best, and safest, healthcare possible.
In fact, his hard work and investment are earning him even more responsibility—he’s being given the opportunity to start taking part in more complex and difficult surgical procedures. Luca is ecstatic about these new roles. But when he’s finally called into the operating room, he realizes he’s not sure what he’s supposed to wear. He asks Penny for guidance.
Penny explains that Luca is regularly going to use personal protective equipment, or PPE, to protect himself while working with patients in many different contexts. PPE is specialized clothing, equipment, and accessories that are developed to protect employees—in this case, healthcare workers—from injury or infection. By providing physical barriers between staff and patients, PPE prevents contact with an infectious agent, dangerous toxins, or infected body fluids. It is designed with the staff members in mind to help them perform their clinical duties without putting them in harm’s way. Penny brings out several different types of PPE, each with a different purpose.
Respiratory protection. It’s vital that medical professionals cover their nose and mouth while working with patients—it is through the respiratory tract that many pathogens can enter the body. Surgical face masks and procedure face masks, for instance, are regularly used in both surgeries and everyday examinations, respectively. There are also respirators, which protect the respiratory tract from airborne infectious agents.
Eye protection. The eyes are especially sensitive and vulnerable to patient body fluids. Spectacles, goggles, shields, and visors are all used by healthcare workers to protect themselves.
Hand protection. The skin is a major source of contamination, and skin-to-skin contact can easily transmit pathogenic microorganisms. Medical providers must touch patients to help diagnose and treat their problems, so wearing gloves is critical.
Body protection. When working in medical facilities, personnel must wear specific clothing to protect themselves. Clothing includes gowns, aprons, head covering, and shoe covers. Although some of these may not be necessary for routine check-ups or assessments, they are necessary PPE for invasive operations or procedures.
Face and head protection. Although masks sometimes fall into this category, there are also facial barriers that provide more complete protection. Facial shields, which are often more durable than masks, can be donned to cover the entire face. Additionally, healthcare workers may wear hair caps or bouffant caps to prevent contamination.
Penny pulls up this video (2:22 min) to quickly show Luca some types of PPE work in action.
After a long day of learning about personal protective equipment or PPE, Luca heads home. He feels like he understands when and how to use various types of protection, from gloves to face shields to foot covers. But he knows there are specific guidelines and regulations that inform how PPE is used in all sorts of environments, from medical facilities to construction sites. When he gets back to his house, he decides to investigate a little more. What are the specific guidelines for PPE used by healthcare workers? And how can those help inform Luca’s approach to delivering quality healthcare?
Luca finds that in the United States, several agencies, including the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, or OSHA, provide comprehensive federal regulations and standards for employers to follow to protect their staff from hazards of all types. In medical facilities specifically, employers are required to keep their staff safe from infectious disease, pathogens, and other dangerous substances. They’re supposed to provide the necessary equipment for healthcare workers to cover their eyes, face, head, and extremities, and this equipment includes protective clothing, respiratory devices, and protective shields and barriers.
He reads some of the general, summarized guidelines to get a better understanding of what’s required.
If exposure to blood is anticipated, the facility must provide appropriate PPE to the healthcare worker. This might be gloves, gowns, lab coats, masks, face shields, eye protection, mouthpieces, resuscitation bags, pocket masks, or other ventilation devices. The employer must clean, launder, or dispose of these items.
Medical professionals must wear gloves when coming into contact with blood, mucous membranes, skin wounds, or other potentially infectious materials. They must also wear gloves when performing invasive procedures, like vascular access procedures, or when handling contaminated instruments or surfaces.
Healthcare providers must wash hands immediately after removing gloves or other PPE.
When it comes to disposing of PPE, the employer has to ensure it’s done properly. But medical professionals have a role to play, too. Before leaving the room, employees must remove protective clothing and place it in the appropriately designated area or container for storage, washing, decontamination, or disposal.
Healthcare workers must wear gloves when handling chemicals or body fluids; wear safety shoes, shoe covers, gowns, and/or aprons if body fluid or dangerous substance is likely to splash; use a respirator when a hazardous substance is airborne, such as tuberculosis; wear head protection, which can help reduce loud noises from equipment; and remove PPE carefully to avoid contamination.
As Luca is beginning to understand, how he puts on and removes PPE is as important as the PPE itself.
Resources and References
Mount Sinai Hospital | Hand Hygiene – Personal Protective Equipment. (2018, April 26). Retrieved from https://youtu.be/gn07GdC4Sxc (Links to an external site.)
Occupational Safety & Health Administration. (n.d.). Healthcare wide hazards: (Lack of) Personal protective equipment. United States Department of Labor. Retrieved from https://www.osha.gov/SLTC/etools/hospital/hazards/ppe/ppe.html (Links to an external site.)
Personal protective equipment. (n.d.). MedlinePlus. Retrieved from https://medlineplus.gov/ency/patientinstructions/000447.htm (Links to an external site.)
Personal Protective Equipment for Infection Control. (n.d.). US FDA. Retrieved from https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/general-hospital-devices-and-supplies/personal-protective-equipment-infection-control (Links to an external site.)
Prompt
Using personal protective equipment is an absolutely integral part of effective healthcare delivery. It keeps medical professionals safe from disease, infection, and even just contact with patients’ bodily fluids.
For this prompt, you’ll circle back to your patient from week one. Remember: you are preparing for a suture procedure in an urgent care clinic. Describe the PPE you would need to use for this procedure and explain what you consider to be the most vital piece of PPE overall, and explain your reasoning.
For your citation, you might use articles that show examples of PPE used in various kinds of clinical scenarios. You can also find articles from experts that discuss how a specific type of PPE works to protect healthcare personnel.
You will also complete two peer responses. In each peer response, you will reply to your peers’ posts with thoughtful, substantive ideas. Consider answering some of these questions: Is there anything your peer missed or overlooked? Are there other ideas to consider? Is there a current event or episode that you can bring into the conversation? Expand and deepen the discussion—introduce new concepts or controversies, add thoughtful and insightful questions, and make new connections to your own experiences or the material.
Your initial and reply posts should work to develop a group understanding of this topic. Challenge each other. Build on each other. Always be respectful, but discuss this and figure it out together.
Reply Requirements
You must submit:
1 main post of 150+ words with 1 in-text citation and reference (follow the Institution Writing Guidelines)
2 follow-up posts (replies) of 50+ words
Responses can be addressed to both your initial thread and other threads but must be:
Your own words (no copy and paste)
Unique (no repeating something you already said)
Substantial in nature, which means there has to be some meat to the reply not something like: “Good job, Rasha, your post is excellent.” A substantial post will do one of the following:
Extend the conversation deeper,
Challenge the post being responded to, or
Take the conversation in a career-relevant tangent
Remember that part of the discussion grade is submitting on time and using proper grammar, spelling, etc. You’re training to be a professional—write like it.
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