Widely used gowns, intended to protect people, can let too much liquid seep through, new studies suggest
Disposable gowns designed to deflect the splatter of bodily fluids, used in thousands of U.S. hospitals, have underperformed in recent and ongoing laboratory tests and may fall short of safety standards, leaving health care workers with a greater risk of infection than advertised.
Isolation gowns are worn by hospital workers to cover their torso and arms before entering rooms of contagious patients, blocking the spray of fluids that could otherwise cling to workers’ clothing and end up in their eyes or mouth. Germs are thought to rarely seep through gowns and sicken the wearer, but with gowns used constantly in hospitals every day, even a small gap in protection could be magnified millions of times over.
Inova Health System, near Washington, D.C., transitioned two of its hospitals to reusable gowns in 2021 to insulate itself from supply chain woes and hopes to introduce the gowns at its remaining three facilities by the end of this year. Before the change, Inova used about 3 million disposable gowns in a year, creating 213 tons of waste, company officials said.
‘We Were Spending Millions of Dollars on Gowns’ Regardless of whether they are washed or trashed, isolation gowns are often worn for mere minutes. But disposable isolation gowns fell far short of industry standards in the recent academic study, conducted by Easter and a textile-testing expert at Florida State University and published in the American Journal of Infection Control in 2021. The tests were performed in 2018, before pandemic shortages eroded the quality of available gowns.
Several brands of reusable gowns passed both tests by comfortable margins, even after being laundered 75 times. Tim Browne, ECRI’s vice president of supply chain solutions, said alarms began to sound amid the supply shortages at the start of the pandemic as desperate hospitals turned to gowns of questionable quality, often imported from Chinese companies.
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