Personal Protective Equipment Against COVID-19

Following this December 2019, COVID-19 has broken out and quickly spread from Wuhan, China despite personal protective equipment against COVID-19 worn by the people. More than 80,000 persons affected, and the attack killed 3,000 over sufferers. The National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China stated that it was the most critical public health emergency and continuously updated the guidelines on COVID-19 diagnosis and practice, aiming to control the epidemic and reduce the mortality rate.

Early research indicated that the established cases and virus vehicles could be the affected source by person-to-person. Facing the great difficulty, more than 40,000 pharmaceutical staff offered to assist Wuhan, and tens of thousands of other therapeutic staff combined to fight the COVID-19 around China.

Personal Protective Equipment against covid-19 Outcomes

They served daily for 8–12 h wearing personal protective equipment(PPE) , including emergency masks, goggles, face shields, and protecting gowns. Regrettably, 80% of them stated that different skin blemishes damaged their health and raised the risk of disease.

Kinds of research published that device-related stress injury (DRPI),moisture-associated skin injury (MASD), and skin tears (ST), mostly happened in sufferers.

Still, no report of skin insults on medical staff wearing PPE has been seen. How were the prevalence and symptoms of skin lesions among medical staff? What were the difficulties in prevention and therapy?

This should be directed primarily. Therefore, we sent a multicenter cross-sectional survey online to understand the kinds and currency, and related factors of skin wounds, to analyze the difficulties in the prevention and therapy of skin injuries among medical staff during the COVID-19 pandemic, and then to implement a basis for developing policies.

Screening Hospitals

The original size was based on the results of more than 80% skin damage described by the first batch of healing staff fighting COVID-19 in Wuhan; the legal error was 1.5% with a 95% confidence interval (CI) and calculated in 2,732 respondents.

Considering 10% of invalid applications, perhaps, a total of 3,036 respondents would be required. This research was supported by the Medical Ethics Committee of Jingling Hospital, Medical School of Nanjing University.

Participant inclusion rules were as follows. According to the guidelines of the management those therapeutic staff who cared for the different COVID-19 cases in emergency departments and screening hospitals were considered with moderate-risk exposure, and should wear surgical masks with goggles or emergency face masks and emergency gowns (called as grade 2 PPE); those therapeutic staff who cared for the COVID-19 patients in the catching area, intensive care units (ICUs), and privacy wards were considered with high-risk exposure.

Preventive Measures

We created a survey questionnaire according to related guides, study literature, and evaluated and reviewed three times by discussing statistics experts, nursing administrators, wound care experts, and feedback from some therapeutic staff in Wuhan.

It contained general data (gender, age, the current position, and occupation), report on the wearing of PPE (grade of PPE and daily wearing time, sweating), data of skin lesions (types, anatomical locations, the hardness of signs, and when they appeared), whether protection was taken (Yes/No), and what preventive measures were adopted (many choice) and rules adopted after injury (multiple choice).

We disseminated the questionnaire to the front-line medical staff via the WeChat social platform from February 8 to 22, 2020. The nominated competent person from 12 hospitals gave the questionnaire link to WeChat groups of therapeutic teams who were working in Wuhan and dangerous departments or isolation wards or ICUs in other hospitals around the country.

Autonomous Regions

Then the attachment was sent continuously to more working groups by WeChat to recruit enough medical staff. Members voluntarily used their cell phones to answer and submit the questionnaire answer online within two weeks.

In total, 4,308 accepted from 161 hospitals in 28 areas or autonomous regions in the whole country, and of the 4,306 respondents examined, 516 (12.0%) were male, 3,790 (88.0%) were female, 505 (11.7%) were doctors, and 3,801 (88.3%) were nurses.

Mean age was 32.5 ± 7.1 years, with 2,903 (67.4%) respondents <35 years and 1,403 (32.6%) respondents ≥35 years. Of them, 1,396 respondents (32.4%) and 2,910 respondents (67.6%) wore grade 3 and grade 2 PPE, individually.

The average regular wear time was 7.7 ± 2.9 h, with 14.3% (615 respondents) and 85.7% (3,691 respondents) daily wear time ≤four and >4 h, sequentially. There were 34.1% (1,467 respondents) with heavy sweating while wearing PPE.