ArticleEmergency medicine Australasia : EMA2023
Does wearing a surgical mask influence face touching by healthcare workers? A retrospective cohort study.
Article in Emergency medicine Australasia : EMA, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed, 5 citations in OpenAlex.
- Considerations of COVID-19 in Ophthalmology.Microorganisms · 2023Review
- Influencing factors of hospital-acquired COVID-19 prevention and control status among emergency support frontline healthcare workers under closed-loop management: a cross-sectional study.Frontiers in public health · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectiveAt 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.
methodsWe 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.
resultsData 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).
conclusionsMask 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.
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