The initial guideline from the Dutch government that employees in elderly care should not wear a mouth mask was not only based on medical advice and safety. Nieuwsuur’s questions show that scarcity did play a role.
RIVM tacitly withdrawn the directive on 17 August. Face masks have since been “necessary,” while the government assumed in previous months that the use of protective equipment for elderly care staff was unnecessary.
Scarcity did indeed play a role in this consideration at the time, confirms RIVM spokesman Harald Wychel. “But the guideline is never based on that.”
He points out that the guideline, derived from a passage on the protection of healthcare personnel working outside the hospital, initially assumed that ‘fleeting contact’ between healthcare staff and patient had such a ‘small risk’ of infection that protection was not necessary. “We are now much stronger in terms of knowledge and a number of guidelines have been scrutinized and adjusted,” says Wychel.
The RIVM informed the umbrella organizations in elderly care of this by e-mail, without mentioning the specific passage. There is no conscious intention behind this, Wychel emphasizes. “If we knew it would cause so much trouble, we would have mentioned it.”
Practice
Conny Helder, board member of ActiZ, the trade association of some 400 healthcare organizations, is “not happy” that it is only now that scarcity has played a role in the drafting of the original guideline in March. “We have argued against this directive from the start. It is very difficult to translate “short contact” into practice, because a staff member does not know in advance how long he will be in a client’s room. Moreover, you quickly come close to a client, for example when shaking a pillow. ”
To overcome the shortage of mouth masks at the start of the corona crisis, (alleged) corona patients in nursing homes were nursed together. The personnel deployed to this specific group were therefore assured of protective equipment.
At the insistence of the trade association, the guideline was amended on 1 May. From now on, employees could determine locally, on the basis of their own professional insight, whether preventive protective equipment was necessary. The scarcity was less dire at that time. “Right now we can work with sufficient resources,” said Helder.
