RAPID: Influence of reusable personal protective equipment on resilience of hospitals in a pandemic

应对Covid-19大流行的一项主要挑战是通过使用和供应个人防护装备来保证卫生保健工作者的安全。目前，美国卫生保健机构的个人防护装备严重短缺，部分原因是对一次性个人防护装备的依赖，必须加以补充。为了提高医疗保健系统的弹性，可以通过使用可重复使用的选项来实现满足个人防护装备基线需求的根本性转变。这项工作的主要目标是对医院如何满足其基本个人防护装备需求的复原力产生新的见解，同时告知医院如何在当前大流行期间提高其复原力，并通过众包信息让公众参与到要求公民制造个人防护装备的卫生保健系统的数量中。该项目将量化一次性使用和可重复使用个人防护装备的等效生命周期，以及医院在大流行事件中使用可重复使用个人防护装备所增加的复原力。生命周期评估将与基于代理的建模相结合，以产生新的基本见解，了解由于可重用个人防护装备的基线使用而导致医院系统弹性的潜在变化。这些见解可能有助于抵御当前的大流行和未来预期的大流行。采用一次性个人防护装备和其他医疗用品主要是出于对卫生保健获得性感染的关注。然而，在需求急剧增加的时期，例如在大流行期间，由于多家医院相互竞争的需求和缺乏可用的供应，这可能导致缺乏可用的个人防护装备。该研究的方法有三个方面：(1)生成关于大流行背景下可重复使用PPE与一次性使用PPE的生命周期的综合数据；(2)创建关于医院弹性的新见解，即使用可重复使用PPE满足其基本负荷PPE需求的函数；(3)生成关于医院供应线实时稳定性的众包信息，即公民自制PPE请求的函数。这项工作建议评估医院应对大流行期间个人防护装备需求激增的应变能力，以及医院满足这些需求的能力。这将产生新的方法来评价目前在危机情况下可重复使用和一次性医疗用品之间的辩论。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

A major challenge in responding to the Covid-19 pandemic is keeping health care workers safe through the usage and supply of personal protective equipment (PPE). There is currently a severe shortage of PPE across health care facilities in the United States, in part due to a reliance on disposable PPE, which must be replenished. In order to increase the resiliency of the healthcare system, a fundamental shift for meeting the baseline demand of PPE may be met by utilizing reusable options. The main goal of this work is to generate new insight on the resilience of hospitals as a function of how they meet their baseline PPE demand, while informing hospitals how to increase their resiliency during this current pandemic, and engaging the public through crowd sourcing information as to the number of health care systems requesting citizen-made PPE. This project will quantify the equivalent life cycles of single use and reusable PPE, and the increase in the resiliency of a hospital as a function of its usage of reusable PPE in pandemic events. Life cycle assessment will be coupled with agent based modeling to generate new fundamental insight as to the potential shifts in the resiliency of a hospital system due to the baseline usage of reusable PPE. These insights may help to weather the current pandemic and future anticipated pandemics. Disposable PPE and other medical supplies have been adopted largely out of a concern for healthcare acquired infections. However, in a time of great surges in demand, such as those which occur during a pandemic, this can result in a lack of available PPE due to competing demands from multiple hospitals and a lack of available supplies. The approach of the study is 3-fold: (1) generate comprehensive data as to the life cycle of reusable versus single use PPE in a pandemic setting, (2) create new insight as to the resiliency of hospitals as a function of meeting their baseload PPE demand with reusables, and (3) generate crowd sourced information as to the real time stability of hospital supply lines as a function of requests for citizen – made PPE. This work proposes to assess the resiliency of a hospital due to surges in demand for PPE during a pandemic, and the ability of the hospital to meet those needs. This will result in new ways of evaluating the current debate between reusable and single use medical supplies in a crisis situation.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.