Abstract

How to protect healthcare workers from the COVID-19 pandemic in a practical way.

Author(s): Rachel Mits

Protecting healthcare workers is a critical component of a successful COVID-19 pandemic response. This is a difficult undertaking due to the resource-intensive nature of infectious disease protection, budgetary constraints, and global shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE). Protecting healthcare workers (HCWs) requires practical, easy-to-implement methods. To generate a narrative overview of worker protection strategies relevant to COVID-19, we cross-reference the "Systems, Space, Staff, and Stuff" paradigm from disaster management with the "Hierarchy of Controls" approach to infection prevention from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). HCW protection can be improved by using different forms of PPE, managing dangers, and restructuring how people work. A thorough PPE strategy can find new or underutilised solutions to HCW protection using the disaster management paradigm of "systems, space, staff, and material."