Communication Assessment in Personal Protective Equipment Ver. 1 [COVID-19]
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Communication Assessment in Personal Protective Equipment
IRAS ID
287391
Contact name
Alexander Malin
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 0 months, 29 days
Research summary
During the current COVID-19 pandemic, personal protective equipment (PPE) has moved to the forefront of priorities for clinicians and policy makers as the national health service attempts to protect it’s workers and the public from a transmission crisis. Although much research has been done into the limitations created by this equipment on non-verbal communication, less research has taken place around the effects on the recognition of the speech of the wearer.\n\nAnaesthetists and ODPs are one hospital team that will likely remain a group of clinicians who will use more protective levels of PPE for an extended period of time after COVID-19 infection rates improve. When this is combined with the high degree of reliance that this team has on communication in high stakes situations, the need for more research into the barriers and potential solutions to overcome them is highlighted.\n\nIn assessing speech recognition, one tool that is commonly used in practice is the AzBio sentence list test5, a collection of spoken word sentences that generate a score based on how many correct words the listener can repeat back to the examiner. Although most sensitive in a quiet environment which is not reflective of the volume of busy environments such as theatre, it still remains both a highly indicative measure of a patient’s ‘real world’ hearing performance as well as being strongly correlated with patients own perceptions of their hearing. This study aims to use speech tests that have been recorded in different levels of PPE protection and to apply them to staff members to generate scores indicative of the intelligibility of speakers when they are wearing communication limiting facial protection. This will be repeated at two distances to represent the normal distances between an anaesthetist and a different members of the theatre team during an operation.
REC name
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REC reference
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