Adult Emergency Department, Auckland City Hospital, Auckland District Health Board, Auckland, New Zealand.
Department of Statistics, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand.
Emerg Med Australas. 2023 Feb;35(1):120-125. doi: 10.1111/1742-6723.14082. Epub 2022 Sep 18.
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare workers (HCW) in our ED were advised against and actively discouraged from wearing masks when not seeing respiratory patients, as mask wearing was thought to increase the risk of droplet transmission by face touching. The primary objective of the present study was to determine whether HCW using face masks were more or less likely to touch their faces than those not wearing masks.
We analysed six randomly selected hours of closed circuit television footage from our staff base. Face touches were recorded electronically by trained researchers. Generalised linear mixed models were used to compare the frequency and duration of face touches with and without face masks, controlling for individual clusters, adjusting for time of footage, duration on screen and staff role.
Data were collected from 187 HCW. Masks were worn in 231 (36%) of 642 screen sessions. Wearing a mask did not significantly change the odds of face touching (odds ratio 0.55, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.30-1.01, P = 0.055) or duration of face touch (mean difference -1.45 s, 95% CI -8.84, 5.99, P = 0.71). For mucosal areas, a significant reduction in the odds of face touching was observed for mask wearers (odds ratio 0.21, 95% CI 0.11-0.43, P < 0.001) and on the frequency of mucosal touches (rate ratio 0.45, 95% CI 0.29-0.69, P < 0.001).
Mask wearing did not change face touching or the duration of face touches. However, significantly fewer mucosal touches were observed when wearing a mask, which may help to reduce nosocomial droplet transmission of viruses.
在 COVID-19 大流行开始时，我们急诊部的医护人员被建议不要在不接触呼吸道患者时戴口罩，因为戴口罩被认为会增加因面部触碰而导致飞沫传播的风险。本研究的主要目的是确定戴口罩的医护人员触摸面部的频率和时长是否少于不戴口罩的医护人员。
我们分析了从我们的员工基地随机选择的六个小时的闭路电视录像。经过培训的研究人员通过电子方式记录面部触碰。使用广义线性混合模型比较了戴口罩和不戴口罩时面部触碰的频率和时长，控制了个体聚类，调整了录像时间、屏幕上的持续时间和员工角色。
共收集了 187 名医护人员的数据。在 642 次屏幕会话中，有 231 次（36%）佩戴了口罩。戴口罩并不会显著改变面部触碰的几率（比值比 0.55，95%置信区间 [CI] 0.30-1.01，P=0.055）或面部触碰的时长（平均差异-1.45 秒，95%CI-8.84，5.99，P=0.71）。对于黏膜区域，戴口罩者的面部触碰几率显著降低（比值比 0.21，95%CI 0.11-0.43，P<0.001），黏膜触碰的频率也显著降低（率比 0.45，95%CI 0.29-0.69，P<0.001）。
戴口罩并未改变面部触碰或触碰时长。然而，当佩戴口罩时，观察到黏膜触碰的次数明显减少，这可能有助于减少医院内病毒的飞沫传播。
