A decidedly bright idea is helping STHS stem the coronavirus mask shortage

At St. Tammany Health Systems, the innovative use of ultraviolet lights designed to sanitize iPads is helping to ease the shortage of N95 and surgical masks. (Photo and video by Tim San Fillippo)

By Mike Scott, mscott@stph.org

It’s a problem faced by hospitals around the country: As the number of COVID-19 patients spikes, so does demand for N95 masks to protect healthcare workers against the virulent coronavirus.

For St. Tammany Health System, however, one decidedly bright idea – involving UV light technology and a little outside-the-box thinking – is helping to stem the resulting supply shortage.

“These devices were actually made to disinfect tablets and iPads. They can charge them, as well,” STHS Utilization Management Department Head Elaine Ward RN said recently while standing in front of a row of five UV light units, each a little larger than a dorm fridge. “I think that’s why they were purchased here at the hospital, and somebody looked at them and said, ‘Why can’t we use it for masks?’”

As it turns out, they could. And, so, after a series of tests were run to confirm the idea, Ward – a 36-year veteran of STHS -- was asked to rally her staff and come up with a system for sanitizing the hospital’s masks en masse.

Twenty-four hours later, the new mask disinfecting lab was up and running.

In its first week, an estimated 4,000-plus masks were cleaned in total. Currently, it can process 700 to 800 masks a day. That includes the coveted N95 masks, which are disinfected three times before being discarded, as well as more standard surgical masks, which can be cleaned until wear-and-tear makes them impractical or unsafe to use.

“So that’s over 4,000 masks that would have been thrown away,” Ward said. “The hospital was using masks at a rate that was not sustainable -- and of course, that’s across the country. That’s the biggest concern of health care providers: the availability of personal protective equipment.”

Of STHS’s six UV machines, one has been dispatched off-site to handle masks at its standalone Emergency Department in Mandeville. The other five are stationed in the new disinfecting lab on the main Covington campus, where two staffers keep the figurative wheels in motion.

The process starts on the floors above, where, at the end of each shift, hospital staff throughout the facility remove their masks – each of which are marked with their name – and place them in a clear plastic bag marked with their name and department. All the marked bags from each unit then go into a “dirty” bin, which is delivered to the disinfecting lab.

There, two staffers – on this particular day it was registered nurses Laura Blue and Cindy Dejean -- line up the bagged masks in the UV machines, each of which can fit 12 masks at a time. After 15 minutes of being bathed in UV light – a touch shorter for N95 masks – they’re flipped over for another 15-minute cycle.

As the masks “cook,” staffers clean the bins, which are then filled with the freshly cleaned masks and put to the side to await pickup by each hospital unit the next day.

The process has been tweaked here and there to maximize efficiency and to account for unforeseen issues. For example, masks were initially placed in zip-close freezer bags for their trip through the UV sanitizing machines – but it was soon discovered that the UV light didn’t penetrate those as well as sandwich bags, so a new batch of bags was put into circulation.

For the most part, however, Ward said the system has worked like a charm. Tests run on the cleaned masks back that up.

“UV technology is widely used across many industries to disinfect many surfaces,” Ward said. “We have it here in our air duct system to kill bacteria that are known to grow in ventilation systems. Other hospitals have them in operating rooms. They roll a blue light into the operating room and turn it on and it disinfects everything in the operating room. So it’s widely used. Many industries use it. We just repurposed it for our masks.”

While it hasn’t completely solved the supply shortage problem, Ward said it has effectively bought the hospital time while manufacturers ramp up production of N95 masks.

“This is just one more way that St. Tammany Health System has used innovation and the dedication of our staff to protect the community,” she said. “We’re a community hospital. We’ve always been a community hospital. We know that every patient we take care of could be our neighbor or our neighbor’s mom – or it could be our mom; somebody could be taking care of our mom – so we always want to do our best to protect our staff and our patients.”

Visit STPH.org/COVID-19  for the latest information on coronavirus in St. Tammany Parish.