HOW COVID-19 VISUALIZED HYGIENE

Hygiene in hospitals

Healthcare workers are at the forefront of this pandemic and they have to deal with patients who are highly infectious on a regular basis. Adherence to hygiene protocols is more important than ever before due to the potency of this disease. However, the implementation of these protocols poses an enormous challenge as the virus is easily transmitted both from human to human and through contact with contaminated environmental surfaces (1,2,3). Furthermore, stressful hospital routines evidently limit the adherence of health care staff to existing quality standards. With the continued rise in cases and overworked staff, a more manageable way to ensure safety in hospitals has been implemented, through the use of single-use equipment, for the most part.

Why we need to change

Tourniquets are one of the most standard items used in day-to-day patient care in hospitals. Reusable types are on average used for nearly two years before replaced and constitute an essential way of healthcare-associated infections. As per studies, more than 70% of scrutinized reusable tourniquets were microbially contaminated, but hardly ever were separate ones used for patients with known infective risk, and only a few adhered to the guidelines of cleaning them in between each patient (1,4,5,6).

For these reasons, a long list of research suggests that reusable tourniquets pose a significant risk of spreading infection (7,8,9) and even advise that their use should be entirely abandoned (10,11).

Most importantly, the implementation of infection control measures only achieved a moderate improvement in hygiene standard compliance (5), underlining the inherent flaws of using multi-use equipment on patients for this kind of procedure.

Single-Use Tourniquets: The new industry standard?

Single-use tourniquets could be one of the most effective measures to circumvent this significant risk of healthcare-acquired infections, including COVID-19, related to basic patient care. In a recent study, 85% of patients deemed a single-use tourniquet at least as good, if not better than reusable tourniquets and 95% of the surveyed health care professionals found it as easy to use as a reusable tourniquet (12). Single-use tourniquets could not only save patients but also staff from potentially deadly infections as in-hospital transmission has been postulated as one of the main routes of COVID-19 spreading among health care workers (13).