On the television news there are care home workers wearing PPE made from bin liners. Could they not wear rainwear, as used by hikers and outdoor workers? It wouldn't be ideal but it must be better than bin liners and sellotape.
The first thing that comes up when I Google 'waterproofs' is Tuffsuit Rainsuit £6.09.
Bill
I bought a fullface snorkel mask.
From Twatter today:
It isn't just about patient-worker contamination. It's also about patient-patient contamination. Separate PPE should be used for each patient.
Anyway, £6.09 is nearly an hour's wage for a minimum-wage care home worker, especially if they're aged 18-20.
Owain
Pak-a-macs ??
Do they still exist ?. I remember them on sale in Woolies
The employer would be buying it.
Bill
Very popular in the Cleethorpes branch!
Bill
Cheaper to replace the worker when they snuff it.
Sorry but that's the blunt truth these days.
And I wonder how many care home staff (particularly cleaners and 'domestics' rather than carers) are agency workers or illegal immigrants with no employment rights anyway.
All this has arisen since they made lots of equipment disposable. At one time it was cleaned, sterilised and re-used many times.
When did they ever wash, dry & iron aprons etc on the scale required to change them between *patients* in an epidemic of the current scale?
Reminds me of the Blondie Video for Atomic. She was wearing bin liners in that. Brian
Quite a number of ?cottage industries? have sprung up making aprons etc - every where from companies that normally make clothes churning out production quantities to individual dress makers producing as many as they can in spare bedrooms, on dining tables, ....
It set me wondering. A few hundred yards from here, there used to be an ?isolation hospital? (long since knocked down). When it was in use, probably in the early part of last century, the concepts of isolation protecting people from infection would have been understood. However, staff wouldn?t have had access to modern materials. Nurses etc must have worn the same apron etc probably all day, unless it got really messy. Sterilisation/ washing must have been a mammoth task.
Of course this is, in part, why now disposable PPE is used.
However, the real thing I couldn?t reconcile is, how, when they used their aprons all day, did they manage to make the isolation hospitals work? And they did work, especially before we had modern drugs etc.
They've been superseded by "Jack in a Pack" waterproofs that cleverly fold up inside one of the pockets.
And that required an army of people (mostly women) and equipmant, and the former all had their RPI-linked pensions at age 60.
If you are prepared to pay (a lot) more tax, like CGT on all house sales, then go for it, but why stop at gowns ?.
I can remember when syringes were glass and washed out, sterilised and reused. Hypodermic Needles were cleaned, sharpened, sterilised and re-used. Ditto Blood taking and giving sets, plus the glass collection bottles.
Think how much money we could save on buying all that American disposable syringe and blood processing equipment if we did.
The metal tubes making up the needles were much larger diameter in those days and were quite painful, as I remember when I was about 5 years old with measles and the district nurse came round to stick one in my posterior! :-(
Why? I had measles at 5 and all I had was some medicine with sugar to help it down. (My mother insisted that too much sugar would stop the medicine from working. No Mary Poppins she.)
Possibly not available in Darkest Somerset in 1956?
Darkest Gloucestershire, 1955.
I wonder how many of we posters to this NG are "of an age"?
I would think all
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