Easing the PPE Strain During the Pandemic

During the early days of the pandemic, one of the healthcare community’s challenges was a critical lack of PPE to fight the coronavirus. Ryan Madewell, Director of Environmental Services at Hunt Regional Healthcare for Vanguard Resources, spoke about this problem and how Surfacide’s UV-C solutions helped keep front-line workers and patients safe.

Even before hospitals began to fill up with coronavirus-infected patients, Madewell said the challenge was always how to get more PPE to prepare for those patients.

“We began researching how we were going to be able to get through if we weren’t able to get more PPE or if there was a limited supply, so we landed on UV light. We already had the Surfacide. We’ve been happy with our Helios system for the past seven years. Finding another use for it was great,” he said.

Due to the infectious nature of the virus, Madewell said the situation provided a dual challenge. While never transitioning entirely away from patient safety, it became essential to protect healthcare workers and employees from the virus.

“The fact [was] we had a limited amount of specifically N95s, but disinfectants [also] became hard to come by,” Madewell said. “We had to make some changes and readdress what our processes were going to be, and we made sure everybody stayed safe and had what they needed to do their job.”

When the CDC provided guidance saying UV-C could be used in an emergency to reprocess N95 respirators, and Madewell and his team put a plan together to use Surfacide.

“Not long after we started trial runs, and began reprocessing when it was necessary,” Madewell said. “And we’ve been doing it ever since.”

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