By Stacy St. Clare
In a workshop at St. Anthony Hospital, (click here) maintenance crews spend time each morning making the sanitizing wipes the medical center can no longer afford to buy.
After soaking paper towels in a liquid mixture developed by an infection preventionist, they deliver the 3.5-gallon buckets — bright green drums with “Menards” printed on them — throughout the 151-bed hospital.
The regular vendor stopped supplying the wipes weeks ago when the medical center struggled to pay its bills on time. And a worldwide shortage has made them difficult to find on the open market, where hospitals now try to outbid each other for precious stock.
With a century-old mission to care for people living in Little Village and other nearby neighborhoods, this is the unorthodox approach St. Anthony must take as it battles both insolvency and a deadly virus that has hit the neighborhoods it serves harder than other parts of the city....
April 29, 2020
By McKayla Haack
Butt, Montana - St. James Healthcare in Butte (click here) will start doing elective surgeries again starting Thursday. It hasn’t done any since late March in order to conserve personal protective equipment and to help reduce the possible spread of the new coronavirus. Their move wasn’t unique -- it followed a recommendation by the Montana Hospital Association.
Everyone who enters the hospital gets their temperature checked and a mask to wear.
“The COVID pandemic has been very challenging for health care workers across the country, across the world,” said Dr. Jennifer Davenport, chief medical officer for St. James Healthcare....
This is an interesting article out of New Zealand. Storage of healthcare supplies has expiration dates. The way this can be overcome is to have the STORED supplies constantly rotated through providing a supply to the health care industry all the time. Is there something wrong in providing masks to hospitals to ensure the national supply is up to date. Better that than being ill-prepared.
April 28, 2020
By Matthew Tso
Two major health agencies (click here) have written-off 100,000 face masks from Wellington's emergency stocks after they were allowed to fall into disrepair.
Earlier in April Stuff reported 10 per cent of the masks held by the Capital & Coast and Hutt Valley district health boards had degraded in storage after staff at Hutt Hospital reported brittle and crumbling elastic fittings on masks issued to stop the spread of coronavirus.
The health boards had intended to retro-fit the masks - which they said had been purchased a decade ago- with new elastic, however in a statement the health boards' joint director of provider services Joy Farley said this idea had been abandoned.
"[The] DHBs made the decision not to continue with the repair of the masks with deteriorated elastic as testing of these retro-fitted masks showed they were not reliably fit for purpose....
The regular vendor stopped supplying the wipes weeks ago when the medical center struggled to pay its bills on time. And a worldwide shortage has made them difficult to find on the open market, where hospitals now try to outbid each other for precious stock.
With a century-old mission to care for people living in Little Village and other nearby neighborhoods, this is the unorthodox approach St. Anthony must take as it battles both insolvency and a deadly virus that has hit the neighborhoods it serves harder than other parts of the city....
April 29, 2020
By McKayla Haack
Butt, Montana - St. James Healthcare in Butte (click here) will start doing elective surgeries again starting Thursday. It hasn’t done any since late March in order to conserve personal protective equipment and to help reduce the possible spread of the new coronavirus. Their move wasn’t unique -- it followed a recommendation by the Montana Hospital Association.
Everyone who enters the hospital gets their temperature checked and a mask to wear.
“The COVID pandemic has been very challenging for health care workers across the country, across the world,” said Dr. Jennifer Davenport, chief medical officer for St. James Healthcare....
This is an interesting article out of New Zealand. Storage of healthcare supplies has expiration dates. The way this can be overcome is to have the STORED supplies constantly rotated through providing a supply to the health care industry all the time. Is there something wrong in providing masks to hospitals to ensure the national supply is up to date. Better that than being ill-prepared.
April 28, 2020
By Matthew Tso
Two major health agencies (click here) have written-off 100,000 face masks from Wellington's emergency stocks after they were allowed to fall into disrepair.
Earlier in April Stuff reported 10 per cent of the masks held by the Capital & Coast and Hutt Valley district health boards had degraded in storage after staff at Hutt Hospital reported brittle and crumbling elastic fittings on masks issued to stop the spread of coronavirus.
The health boards had intended to retro-fit the masks - which they said had been purchased a decade ago- with new elastic, however in a statement the health boards' joint director of provider services Joy Farley said this idea had been abandoned.
"[The] DHBs made the decision not to continue with the repair of the masks with deteriorated elastic as testing of these retro-fitted masks showed they were not reliably fit for purpose....
