Consultant Anaesthetists at ROH have developed a solution to save time when delivering life-saving procedures.
Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) is helping to protect medical staff from the risk of contracting COVID-19, especially during airway management procedures like intubation. However, it can take up to 7 minutes to correctly and safety apply full PPE.
The tool is called a Disposable Resuscitation, Intubation and Nebulisation Kit Shield or ‘DRs INK Shield’ for short and was developed by ROH Consultant Anaesthetists Dr Egidio J da Silva, Dr Chandra Bhimarasetty and Dr Tom Neal along with Matthew Campbell-Hill, Senior Fellow from the University of Birmingham. It is a pop-up tent which acts as a shield, offering quick and effective protection for medical staff.
It enables medical staff to rapidly form a workable protective barrier around a patient before carrying out life-saving procedures, wherever they are.
The product is a wrapped, disposable, mini pop-up tent covering the patients head, neck and shoulder-level chest area with further coverage of the torso through an integrated drape. The shield is see-through and has self-closing access points, allowing medical staff to have easy line-of-sight hand access in and around the patient’s airway. The DRs INK Shield is 1/10th of the weight and less than 1/5th of the cost of hard box solutions and is collapsible for easy transport, storage and disposal in standard yellow waste bins.
The innovation will be featured on ITV Central tonight, Friday 3 April 2020.
Dr Egidio J da Silva
Dr Chandra Bhimarasetty
Dr Tom Neal
