RMO Day 13 - PPE. Our Lives Depend on It.

Box of supplies

In fighting COVID-19, Healthcare Workers do not have any superpowers. All our work here is protocol-driven and involves teamwork. Everybody has a role, and we work as a unit. Today is 30th March. Typically, the entries on the day were about Doctor’s Day celebration. For this year, I think that can wait. Especially after reading reports that 12300 Healthcare Workers in Spain were infected. Madness!

We are still struggling to find the cure for it, and with any viruses, preventing ourselves from contracting them is the first line of defence. Once we picked up the infection, there will be luck involved. The vast majority of patients will recover with some help. Some patients need more help than others. But the primary treatment we employ is actually making sure that those infected do not pass the virus on to others.

Therefore, isolation and protection are of the utmost importance. And as frontliners, part of our responsibility is to make sure that we do not get infected. Infection means we can get ill, we can pass it on to other patients, our family members and colleague. We might also end up being quarantined, which will further stretch the limited workforce on the ground. So personal protection in very important.

And how do we do it? We do it by being sensible. The virus passes on through droplets and with droplets, touch is also a mode of spread. So, we prevent direct physical contact and have a layer of repellent between ourselves and the patients. We also make sure that we clean our hands often with hand washing. Nothing fancy. An age-old ritual from the days of Florence Nightingales.

We employ Personal Protection Equipment on ourselves - we call this PPE. We create a physical barrier between ourselves and the patients. A form of a shield. From head to toes. But the gear must be flexible since we also need to be mobile and actively caring patients.

This PPE comes in many guises. It also depends on the degree of protection needed. If we are doing procedures which increase the risk of spread, then the level of the barrier is higher - where respirator and Tyvek suits were recommended. The equipment that I use consists of shoe covers, hood, mask, face shield, a layer of water-repellent gown and two laters of gloves. The gown may be supplemented by an extra apron - which I prefer. In between patients, we discard the outer layers of apron, gloves and shoe covers, until we see the patients.

SJMC has a dedicated ward to place the patients with suspected COVID-19 infection while we were waiting for their confirmatory results. We placed a group of trained nurses here and pool our resources. It looks like on the next week, the number of beds dedicated to isolation will be increased as the number of suspected cases go up.

As long as we adhere to the protocol and be sensible, we should be fine. But convincing our family members that these steps were adequate takes some convincing, as in life, nothing is ever 100% safe. We will try our best to minimise exposure, as protecting ourselves are our primary responsibility. So far, in Malaysia, the number of infection from caring for patients remained very minimal, unlike the reports from Spain. Stay safe all ...