Doctors and Nurses need better masks

[EnemyOfEducationNo1]

Doctors and nurses are asking for full FFP3 for ALL medical staff in ALL clinical settings (not just with Covid positive identified patients) due to the airborne nature of the virus.

www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n30

We should all support this by writing to our MPs

I caught Covid on our ward wearing a surgical mask, apron, visor, and gloves. It isn't sufficient

Yep we’ve really been thrown to the wolves. I’m a sonographer. I have a normal surgical mask. I do a high risk procedure due to sitting face to face with a patient for over twenty minute. We asked for screens at the start of all this between us and the patients.They still haven’t arrived. Prob will when the pandemic is over.
Oh and of course now we have partners in most obstetric scans with us, because there was a big social media compaign.
Something along the lines of my friends can go to the pub but my partner can’t come to my scan. Course can’t go to the pub anymore. But now we are stuck with partners coming in. It’s ok. The mums are happy. Never mind the staff.

Can anyone help - what's the difference between FFP3 and N95?

That's shocking. How well ventilated are the sonography rooms?

ffp3 masks are good but you can't just put one on and be protected, you need to be fit tested and even then you can only wear the masks you were fitted to wear so cannot just pick off the shelf. I think this is one of the reasons they are not worn everywhere.

Most don’t even have a window Enemy of education. We have AC. In the first lockdown we weren’t allowed to have the ACs on fro a couple of months while they procrastinated over whether it was safe or not. Great with a massive machine kicking out a load of heat,

@Didyousaynutella I’m a community nurse. I don’t have a uniform so go from house to house sitting on sofas with my plastic apron that protects me from paperwork. We aren’t allowed to ask people to wear masks in their own homes so only I wear a normal surgical mask. We ask just for one person to be in the room but I’ve been in some where there have been 8?! I’ve felt unable to enforce the one person only rule as I’d have been asked to leave and the visits need to be done as currently no option to invite to a clinic.

Can’t believe you can’t make them wear a mask in their home. That’s ridiculous. We have also been told if a patient refuses to wear a mask we have to scan them still x

@Indecisive12 that's crazy. My ambulance service trust have rejigged the script for when people call on the 9s or 1s - to include please wear a mask when the crew arrives. Not many take up the advice though. Hence why I've got COVID, again.
We have been crying out for better PPE but our medical directorate are still going with the PHE guidelines which means our trust cannot purchase over and above what we've already got.
Ultimately, in the NHS and wider circle it's the PHE who are accountable.

No thank you. Flimsy surgical mask for 12 hours is bad enough, please don’t make me wear an FFP3

It's appalling. Of course 2 ply masks are inadequate when dealing with patients with Covid. There are so many nurses off sick.

@Didyousaynutella I'm sorry you are being put in this position. Our local Trust are now back to no partners for scans, no doubt in response to 50% of the sonography team currently being off sick.

@Nellodee

This does my head in. Could we not have set up some kind of manufacturing base for these in the U.K., given we’ve had almost a year?

Apparently we are already making a lot more FFP3 masks in this country now. We do actually have quite an established paper-based manufacturing industry that could be redirected. A lot more should have been done by 10 months into this.

It is terrible that only ICU staff get proper PPE while the staff on the 'cohort' wards with 100s of patients get a paper mask and plastic pinny, despite the viral loads being immense. Plus many of these nursing staff will have to take their uniforms home to wash them in the family machines. Proper scrubs for all hospital staff with industrial laundry should have been arranged by now. Employer's duty of care by law apparently does not extend to the NHS. No wonder over 600 are dead and many more have ongoing physical and mental illness.

Austria and Bavaria apparently have mandatory FFP2 masks on public transport and in shops. Germany is probably going to introduce the same.

The UK won't even give FFP2 masks to NHS staff treating hundreds of Covid-19 patient every day (let alone police the wearing of any kind of face covering in shops and public transport in case anyone is rude to a police officer, so instead the UK places the police in the countryside to limit where the general population does its exercise). Total shit show of a country.

And not coincidentally the UK has the highest death rate in the world right now (see Guardian for source).

If only the FFP2/3 masks were in the hospitals, if only the police were enforcing the law on face coverings in places were virus transmission occurs and not fining people for taking exercise. Those kinds of misplaced priorities are why the UK has the world's highest death rate.