Non-Compliance with PPEs

Type: Essay

Subject: Nursing Leadership Course

Subject area: Nursing

Education Level: Masters Program

Length: 2 pages

Referencing style: APA

Preferred English: US English

Spacing Option: Double

School: Chamberlain University

Title: Kickoff paper

Important notes: the topic of project is compliance of emergency department staff with wearing ppe, and the reasons for non-compliance. please see atattched documents to help with over view.

Non-Compliance with PPEs

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Introduction

Standard precautions for health care workers are recommended to reduce the transmission of infectious diseases between people and places. The main purpose of the protective precaution is to ensure health workers are protected, patients within the health facilities are safe, and visitors on the premises are not exposed to the diseases. Unfortunately, there are cases of noncompliance from the health workers in using the personal protective equipment. The latest instance of the issue was through an adherence observation during the world facing the infectious COVID-19. Most healthcare workers exhibit deficiencies in the use of the recommended personal protective equipment, which calls for critical measures and guidelines to be adopted to increase the adherence rates.

Also Read: Why Is APA Citing Important for Nursing Students

Literature Review

Despite knowing the importance of wearing personal protective equipment, the compliance rates for the standard protection within the clinical setting are lower. While the world has experienced severe outbreaks in the past, there is still low adherence across facilities about the PPEs (Neuwirth, Mattner & Otchwemah, 2020). The clinicians tend to overlook the important guidelines set to ensure their protection and ensure the infectious diseases do not transmit from one patient to another. Most of the clinicians fail to acknowledge that they may be carriers of infectious illnesses and contribute to the adverse spread of the disease. Limited supervision and leadership demotivate the nurses from using their PPEs (Hoernke et al., 2021). Nurses are often willing to use their protective equipment when their leader shows commitment, knowledge, and ability to organize the team and act as a role model in using the PPEs.

Methodology

The research was conducted through a prospective observational study across wards in a hospital amid the current COVID-19. The wards observed included two intensive, two intermediate, and four standard care units within the same hospital facility. One intermediate, one intermediate, and one standard care unit were based on the pulmonology section. They have vast experience with infectious respiratory prior to the coming of the current coronavirus pandemic. Therefore, these units were specifically dedicated to the COVID-19 patients. The study includes a review of the adherence rates between these wards and the others categorized as non-COVID-19 wards to collect data needed to establish the objective of the research.

Results

The findings indicate that the COVID-19 wards exhibited complex total compliance with 85% of the PPE use than the non-COVID-19 units with an adherence rate of 76%. The increase in compliance to hand cleanliness and tiring PPE showed major impacts on the overall adherence (Prakash et al., 2020). The adherence to different endorsements such as no wearing jewelry on the hands and wrist before donning PPE and final HD after patient care was lower in the non-COVID-19 wards. While the wards designated for COVID-19 showed positive results, there was a deficit in fitting the masks in a higher proportion of all the observed wards. The observations conclude lack of knowledge on how to wear masks correctly and the exercise on how to wear them in routine practice (Barratt, Shaban & Gilbert, 2020). The fact that the COVID-19 wards displayed higher adherence than the other wards is a call for alarm. It is possible that before the outbreak of the pandemic, the entire hospital facility had similar adherence behaviors towards the PPEs and exposed them to higher risks. This could explain why many healthcare workers succumbed to the disease when it was first detected across the world.   

References

Barratt, R., Shaban, R. Z., & Gilbert, G. L. (2020). Characteristics of personal protective equipment training programs in Australia and New Zealand hospitals: A survey. Infection, disease & health, 25(4), 253–261. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.idh.2020.05.005

 Hoernke, K., Djellouli, N., Andrews, L., Lewis-Jackson, S., Manby, L., Martin, S., Vanderslott, S., & Vindrola-Padros, C. (2021). Frontline healthcare workers' experiences with personal protective equipment during the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK: a rapid qualitative appraisal. BMJ open, 11(1), e046199. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2020-046199

Neuwirth, M. M., Mattner, F., & Otchwemah, R. (2020). Adherence to personal protective equipment use among healthcare workers caring for confirmed COVID-19 and alleged non-COVID-19 patients. Antimicrobial Resistance & Infection Control, 9(1). doi:10.1186/s13756-020-00864-w

Prakash, G., Shetty, P., Thiagarajan, S., Gulia, A., Pandrowala, S., Singh, L., Thorat, V., Patil, V., Divatia, J. V., Puri, A., & Pramesh, C. S. (2020). Compliance and perception about personal protective equipment among health care workers involved in the surgery of COVID-19 negative cancer patients during the pandemic. Journal of surgical oncology, 122(6), 1013–1019. https://doi.org/10.1002/jso.26151