By Mike Morgan

In these times of short supply, Materials Management is often the department looked to for supplies by employees, clinicians and patients. I'm sure there are nearly as many ways of doing this as there are people doing the job. The following article is how our facility (McPherson Hospital) did and is still tracking personal protective equipment usage at facilities.

Very early on, I was appointed the PPE Czar during this COVID-19 pandemic at McPherson. Our first task was to get a count of what we had in stock, checking supplies stashed in emergency tubs and lockers, and accessing everyone's hidden stash. All of these supplies were returned to Materials Management for counting and checking for usability. We also immediately started ordering our allocation amounts on needed items and checking backorder fill lists. To this day, we maintain a daily count on the PPE items in stock, as well as what each department has in their possession as of that day. With the slowing of usage, the department count has now been reduced to Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

We also formed a PPE committee comprised of nurse managers, risk management, infection control, med staff and myself. At first, we met after our hospital-wide huddle every morning. In the beginning, the committee changed PPE policies almost daily to stay in compliance with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kansas Department of Health and Environment guidelines.

My next phase was to partner with the schools, both public and colleges, to see if there were things we could do to help one another. There were a few things we were able to exchange with each other.

Here in McPherson, we were fortunate to have some construction companies like Hutton and GBA, who were willing to loan us negative air HEPA units to convert some of our rooms to COVID-19 rooms by installing temporary walls. Both of these great companies contacted us since they weren't able to work a lot during this time.

In addition, CHS, our local refinery, started a program for 15 P-100 respirators. They clean and reprocess them daily, for both the ones we use, as well as theirs. We have been using these for our EMS crew and have saved a ton of N-95 mask use. Along with this, we have been able to use our MaxAirs to help save N-95 masks.

We have received a couple of nice (level 1) mask donations from a local restaurant owner, as well as homemade masks for everyone's use from some of our volunteers and local quilt guild.

Last but not least, we requested and received some PPE from the state healthcare coalition. I send in a weekly usage report and feel it has helped us to be in the thoughts of the folks who decide who gets what. We are soon going to start using Battelle to try to decontaminate our eligible N-95's as well.

So, stay strong materials folks! You have never been needed more!