JPS Hats Off!

This is Todd Ponsky with the Journal of Pediatric Surgery, and today we're gonna address a hot topic of debate in the operating room, which is the safest headgear to wear in the operating room. Is it this? Is it this or is it this? Well, this question was just answered in a recent study called Hats Off, a study of different operating room headgear assessed by environmental quality indicators. The first author was Doctor Troy Markle and the senior author Doctor Jennifer Wagner. This was done out of Riley Children's Hospital in Indianapolis. This was a really cool study. What they did is they compared 3 types of hats to wear in the operating room and they did a head to head to head trial. They looked at cloth skullcaps. They looked at disposable bouffant caps and they looked at disposable skull caps, and what they did is they compared the material, whether it was porous or permeable. They looked at contaminants within the air and they looked at contaminants on the field in a mock OR. The way they assessed air contaminants was through what they called active sampling with a vacuum that sucked the air and evaluated it. The passive sampling was what was found on the field, both microbial or particles. So what did they find? What they found was that the disposable bouffant cap had the most permeability and the most porous out of all three hats this, the disposable skull cap, or the cloth skull cap. When they looked at contamination or particle shedding, they found that when they used that vacuum to assess active sampling in the air, there was really no difference. But when they looked at the field, they found a big difference between what was shed on the field that the disposable bouffant caps had the highest shedding of all three of these caps. There was the most microbial and particle shedding on the field. They got into much more detail in the article talking about the different types of material used in the skull cap, but the gist is that the cloth skull cap had the lowest permeability and the lowest porous material and had very low shedding compared to the disposable bouffant cap. I don't think it's about what type of hat it is. I think it's much more about the thickness of the material. That is why at our hospital we've actually switched to this type of thicker bouffant cap, which is less porous. I thought this was a great study, something we finally need to address to find out which type of cap is the safest to wear in the operating room. I want to congratulate Troy Markel on a fantastic paper. We hope you enjoyed this review. Please leave your comments and suggestions below. We'll see you next time. Is it the Is Um. It's it. OK. OK, is it this? OK. Is it this or is it this? sweaty. Well, this study was answered. Well, this question was answered. OK, wait. Well, this study was Well, this question was just answered. Well, this, Well, this question was just answered in a recent study called Hats Off, a study of.