Impact of personal protective equipment on clinical output and perceived exertion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND AND AIM: Safe clinical care within Ebola Virus Disease Treatment Units (EVDTUs) mandate the use of personal protective equipment (PPE), comprising a fluid impermeable hooded suit, visor, gloves and rubber boots. The aim of this study was to assess the impact of this PPE on clinical personnel's performance in the EVDTU, Kerry Town, Sierra Leone. METHODS: An anonymous questionnaire was administered to healthcare professionals (HCPs) entering the EVDTU ward area (Red Zone (RZ)), during a 2-week period to assess perceived exertion using the Borg Rating of Perceived Exertion Scale. RESULTS: A total of 62 clinical episodes undertaken by 20 HCPs were analysed. There were no episodes of heat illness during the study. HCPs spent a median of 74 (IQR 55-95) minutes within the RZ. Median durations of RZ activity were similar throughout the 24 h period (p=0.22), but Borg scores were significantly higher between 11:00 and 14:59 compared with RZ entry between 15:00 and 10:59, respectively (12 (6-15), n=13; 8 (6-9), n=48; p=0.022). Rates of weight loss per minute spent within the RZ were significantly greater between 11:00 and 14:59 compared with 15:00-10:59, respectively (0.014 (0.009-0.023) kg/min, n=6; 0.007 (0.004-0.013) kg/min, n=37; p=0.037). CONCLUSIONS: Despite acclimatisation and proactive clinical tasking, HCPs in the EVDTU experienced significantly greater rates of weight loss and perceived exertion scores during the hottest times of the day. These findings should be considered by those planning healthcare facilities for future humanitarian missions where HCPs will provide clinical care in full PPE.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".