Elizabeth Beam, PhD, RN, discussing donning and doffing

6 February 2023

Elizabeth Beam: [T]he thing that we tried to do, one of the media projects we took on pretty early was not only this donning and doffing and respirators in general, which we kind of had that one in the bag, but we worked on one for the extended use and reuse, because reuse was something that really nobody had anything on, and that was one of our fastest growing videos once it came out. Initially, we kind of tried to do everything and we realized that was like a 30 minute video and nobody watches a 30 minute video. So we focused on that reuse piece, because extended use is pretty much just wear it longer. But if you're going to reuse something, you really have to think about the dance of taking it off gently and putting it somewhere where it can kind of desiccate and dry. And so, helping people understand that was important. And so, we kind of filtered it down to just that part. But all of that, you know, were the things that we could do to help people. And, you know, I had people reach out who had been our long term—long time HEROES, groupies, if you will, who said, “My gosh, thank you. Like, we used your video to make sure everybody was educated on how to wear their respirator” and so on and so forth. And so, I think that's the weird thing about being HEROES is you don't know exactly every story, but like you hear later, whether it was COVID or whether it was Ebola. Like I remember, you know, like I said, I was breastfeeding and other things during that time, but a lot of the groups that went down to like Texas after the Thomas Duncan case to help with education down there that like, “HEROES is amazing. [Laughter] Like, we found so much stuff on there, it was great.” It was just like, it was kind of cool to hear at least secondhand from people that people were finding our content and were really grateful for, not because it was exactly what they were going to do, but at least it was an example and then they could tweak. I remember we went to Denver Health for one of the site visits for NETEC and they were so—they were like, “We get it, we get it. So we’re going to do this part and then we're going to walk a little bit further into the decon shower and take this part off and that part off based on kind of what you did. But our situation is a little different.” Like that's exactly what the education’s designed to do.

From the McGoogan Health Sciences Library Special Collections and Archives