Covid: hospitals are washing gowns at 60C to reuse PPE

Some hospitals have found that they can wash gowns at 60 degrees and reuse them without losing effectiveness.

According to a senior NHS official, some hospitals now are washing single-use protective gowns at 60C so they can be used several times: it should be done because of the shortage during the Covid pandemic. Chris Hopson, the chief executive of NHS Providers, also said hospitals could not rely on government promises that more personal protective equipment (PPE) was on the way.

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Covid: hospital are washing gowns to reuse the PPE

The head of the membership organization for NHS trusts in England said some trusts had taken to “hand to mouth” arrangements, with one discovering that some types of gowns remained fluid-repellent if washed at high temperatures.

He said several NHS trusts were now “investigating” whether they can safely wash and reuse the fluid-repellent gowns offering the highest level of protection to frontline workers.

“There’s one trust that discovered that if you launder those gowns at 60 degrees, what they’ve found is that there are probably up to three times you can do that and the gowns appear to still be capable of being fully fluid repellent,” he said. Mr. Hopson also spoke about the delayed shipment of 400,000 gowns the government expects to receive from Turkey.

He said to let us just focus on what we know we can be certain of. “A great example would be that last week, there was an order for 200,000 gowns due to come in from China but only 20,000 actually arrived. We know that with other orders when the boxes were opened up and it said on the outside ‘gowns’ when you opened it up, they were actually masks.”

Niall Dickson, chief executive of the NHS Confederation echoed Mr Hopson’s concerns over the Turkey shipment to not made the announcement in the first place. He also said that staff would need to make their own assessment over whether they felt safe with the PPE currently on offer. The NHS is thought to use around 150,000 gowns a day, meaning the stock from Turkey would last less than three days even if delivered as promised.