Weekly Poll: H1N1 respiratory protection
Lately, there has been a debate among healthcare and employee safety experts about respiratory protection for healthcare workers against influenza A H1N1. It’s a debate that is becoming increasing more important as medical facilities finalize their pandemic planning and prepare for what could be a difficult flu season.
Some experts suggest that healthcare workers will have enough protection with surgical masks, while others contend N95s are the only legitimate form of protection. What do you think? Let us know your reasoning in the comments section below.
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OSHA Healthcare Advisor Poll
The OSHA Healthcare Advisor Poll is our weekly questionnaire that is updated every Monday. It is a great opportunity for you to let us know what is going on at your facility, while also getting a look at what your peers have to say. Every week we will post a new question related to healthcare safety. As always, if you have any burning questions of your own, post them in the comments section below and it could become a featured poll question.
OSHA Healthcare Advisor Poll has written 156 posts.
Comments
Facility does not have negative air rooms for airborne infections. If H1N1 is catagorized as airborne, the facility would not accept H1N1 patients.
Surgical masks are used and droplet precautions are used for seasonal flu.
facility will follow recommendations from CDC that will hopefully be published later this year.
We will use N95 respirators since CalOSHA has mandated their use in their Aerosol Transmissible Disease standard. We would be comfortable using surgical masks since the majority of experts state H1N1 is spread by droplet means, thus using surgical or procedure masks and contact precautions including eye protection would be adequate. The availability of N95 respirators is also of concern.
Until and unless CDC changes their recommendation, we will be following those guidelines, like it or not. Keeping the recommendation to use negative pressure rooms severely limits the number of H1N1 patients any facitlity could handle, and if the prediction of numbers come true for this fall, we will all be having problems.
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