Though they’ve got plenty of personal protection equipment (PPE) to handle COVID-19 patients and they’ve implemented new ways of preserving it, Owensboro Health has already run through the large supply of donated cloth masks and is in need of thousands more.
Debbie Zuerner Johnson, OH’s director of community engagement, said the hospital had used 2,724 donated masks as of Friday afternoon. With only 550 cloth masks on hand, OHRH needs at least another 2,500 to see the COVID-19 pandemic through.
“I know discussions on Facebook have said we can’t use them, but we are,” Zuerner Johnson said about the donated cloth masks.
The cloth masks are being used to protect and preserve surgical masks that are now being worn by both Owensboro Health team members and patients who come into the hospital for treatment.
The misconception that the hospital is running low and not using donated masks stems from a few things, Zuerner Johnson believes, including reports that hospitals across the U.S. are facing PPE shortages.
“If you can’t physically see it — if you don’t see it first-hand, it’s hard to [conceive the facts that we’re using these masks],” she said. “We have PPE and, yes, we’re preserving PPE. We don’t know where we’ll be two to three weeks from now.”
The hospital has taken on innovative measures in preserving and conserving their N95 masks by sterilizing them. The same team at OHRH that sterilizes surgical equipment sterilizes the N95 masks so that they can be worn up to five times before disposal. Only those working the critical care unit are given N95 masks — two masks per person, per shift.
Once an employee’s shift is over, the masks are placed in a paper bag and handled carefully through a process mandated by the CDC. The bag is taken to the sterilization team and the mask is reprocessed. If the sterilization team detects a mask can’t be reused, they dispose of it immediately.
“They’ve developed this sterilization process, and we’ve actually shared this with another hospital in Kentucky,” Zuerner Johnson said, adding that Owensboro Health’s pattern for cloth hand-sewn face masks has been shared across the state as well.
Surgical masks do not undergo the same sterilization process, but the team at Owensboro Health is in the process of developing a way to reprocess those as well.
As for the cloth masks, those are laundered and inspected by a team at the hospital before being used, and they serve as a protective barrier that keeps the surgical masks from being soiled or touched.
“We initially may have held back distribution of them until we had enough for everyone,” Zuerner Johnson said. “Someone is counting those masks every single day. There are hundreds and hundreds of people making these masks. People from across the country have been sending them to us because they wanted to help.”
Zuerner Johnson hopes that giving spirit from the community will continue.
“Our gratitude toward those who’ve donated these masks has been indescribable,” she said.
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The Owensboro Health coronavirus hotline is available 24/7 by calling 877-888-6647. Call the hotline before seeking in-person care. More information from OH can be found here.
For the latest information and data on COVID-19 in Kentucky visit kycovid19.ky.gov or dial the Kentucky state hotline at 800-722-5725.
For the latest health guidelines and resources from the CDC, visit their website here.
