Theatre staff's knowledge of surgical face masks.

Surgical face masks have been worn for over a century. Their initial implementation was to reduce wound infection by reducing droplet spread from the surgical team's mouth and nose. More recently face masks have been worn to protect the surgical team from contamination from patients and hazards within the operating theatre. To facilitate this, a range of face masks is available. The commonest are the standard face mask with a filtration ability of approximately 5 microns, and the LASER face mask with a filtration ability of 1.1 microns. The purpose of this study was to determine staff's knowledge of face masks.