Most health care facilities have no plans to discontinue universal masking, survey shows
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Key takeaways:
- Overall, 97% of facilities had no immediate plans to discontinue universal masking.
- Common reasons for universal masking included preventing transmission of respiratory viruses and minimizing the impact on staffing capacity.
A survey assessing universal masking showed nearly all facilities represented planned to continue doing so, with the most common reasons being prevention of respiratory viruses and limiting the impact on staff.
“In dialog with our hospital epidemiology colleagues, my co-authors and I saw value in not only knowing what approaches their facilities were taking to masking but the rationale for their choice,” Graham M. Snyder, MD, SM, medical director of infection prevention and hospital epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, told Healio.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has been dynamic, risk to those receiving and providing care in health care settings is variable by person and over time, and the SARS-CoV-2 virus is circulating in an unusual ecology of respiratory viruses rebounding after years with little respiratory virus activity,” Snyder said.
He added that the basis for hospital epidemiologists’ approach may be “informative for future respiratory virus seasonal and nonseasonal epidemics.”
Snyder and colleagues surveyed health care epidemiologists in the U.S. after the CDC published its updated COVID-19 guidance to assess their facilities’ planned approach to universal masking and unmasking outside of patient care areas, including their rationale behind maintaining universal masking.
Among 44 health care epidemiologists invited to participate, 34 responded. Most worked for health systems with multiple acute-care hospitals (76.5%) or facilities with 500 beds or more (17.6%).
Thirty-three respondents (97.1%) said that their facility has no immediate plans to discontinue universal masking, and one respondent (2.9%) said that their facility had already discontinued or planned to discontinue universal masking when community transmission levels of COVID-19 were not high, according to the study.
The most common reasons for not discontinuing universal masking were preventing non- SARS-CoV-2 seasonal respiratory viruses (90.9%) and limiting the impact on employee staffing capacity (72.7%).
Other reasons included transmission patterns among employees and/or patients in the facility (54.5%) and assessment of scientific evidence of mask effectiveness in health care settings (54.5%), as well as patient and employee feelings being in favor of masking.
“Hospital epidemiologists from this sample of predominantly large facilities and health systems continued universal masking for its benefit to safety in acute care settings, including protecting patients and health care workers from both COVID-19 and other circulating seasonal respiratory viruses. The future role of universal masking should consider the prevalence of respiratory viruses and their measurable impact on acquisition and subsequent infection in healthcare settings,” Snyder said.
Collapse
Read more about
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts