The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Monday released tightened guidance on use of personal protective equipment (PPE) for U.S. health care workers to ensure they are better prepared to treat Ebola patients.
The guidance focuses on specific PPE health care workers should use and offers detailed, step-by-step instructions for how to put the equipment on and take it off safely. The CDC also released a fact sheet on the changes in the PPE guidance.
The original guidelines “were developed by experts at CDC with consultation and approval from infectious disease control experts around the United States and consistent with World Health Organization guidelines,” said CDC Director Tom Frieden, MD. They “have been used successfully before. “Even a single health care worker infection is one too many.”
The enhanced guidelines center on three principles:
- All health care workers undergo rigorous training and are practiced and competent with PPE, including taking it on and off in a systemic manner.
- No skin is exposed when PPE is worn.
- All workers are supervised by a trained monitor who watches each worker taking PPE on and off.
The guidance reflects recent experience from safely treating patients with Ebola at Emory University Hospital, Nebraska Medical Center and National Institutes of Health Clinical Center.
“The greatest risk in Ebola care is in the taking off of whatever equipment the health care worker has on—whether there’s skin exposed or not,” Dr. Frieden said. “One of the critical aspects of these guidelines is a very structured way of doing that step by step” under supervision, making it ritualized and done with standardized equipment.
The CDC urged health care workers to ask any patient with a fever if that patient has traveled in the past 21 days.
“Every health care worker needs to know how to screen a patient who may have Ebola,” Dr. Frieden said. “CDC is increasing training offerings for health care staff across the country and we'll be developing materials and videos, but really there's no alternative to hands-on training.”
Looking for additional expert information about Ebola? Get the facts from credible sources via the AMA’s Ebola Resource Center.
