Personal protective equipment (PPE) is protective clothing, helmets, goggles, or other garments or equipment designed to protect the wearer's body from injury or infection. The hazards addressed by protective equipment include physical, electrical, heat, chemical, biohazards, and airborne particulate matter. Protective equipment may be worn for job-related occupational safety and health purposes, as well as for sports and other recreational activities. Protective clothing is applied to traditional categories of clothing, and protective gear applies to items such as pads, guards, shields, or masks, and others. PPE suits can be similar in appearance to a cleanroom suit.
A nurse uniform is attire worn by nurses for hygiene and identification. The traditional nurse uniform consists of a dress, apron and cap. It has existed in many variants, but the basic style has remained recognizable.
Hospital volunteers, also known as candy stripers in the United States, work without regular pay in a variety of health care settings, usually under the direct supervision of nurses.
Internal medicine, also known as general internal medicine in Commonwealth nations, is a medical specialty for medical doctors focused on the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of internal diseases in adults. Medical practitioners of internal medicine are referred to as internists, or physicians in Commonwealth nations. Internists possess specialized skills in managing patients with undifferentiated or multi-system disease processes. They provide care to both hospitalized (inpatient) and ambulatory (outpatient) patients and often contribute significantly to teaching and research. Internists are qualified physicians who have undergone postgraduate training in internal medicine, and should not be confused with "interns", a term commonly used for a medical doctor who has obtained a medical degree but does not yet have a license to practice medicine unsupervised.
A hospital-acquired infection, also known as a nosocomial infection, is an infection that is acquired in a hospital or other healthcare facility. To emphasize both hospital and nonhospital settings, it is sometimes instead called a healthcare-associated infection. Such an infection can be acquired in a hospital, nursing home, rehabilitation facility, outpatient clinic, diagnostic laboratory or other clinical settings. A number of dynamic processes can bring contamination into operating rooms and other areas within nosocomial settings. Infection is spread to the susceptible patient in the clinical setting by various means. Healthcare staff also spread infection, in addition to contaminated equipment, bed linens, or air droplets. The infection can originate from the outside environment, another infected patient, staff that may be infected, or in some cases, the source of the infection cannot be determined. In some cases the microorganism originates from the patient's own skin microbiota, becoming opportunistic after surgery or other procedures that compromise the protective skin barrier. Though the patient may have contracted the infection from their own skin, the infection is still considered nosocomial since it develops in the health care setting. Nosocomial infection tends to lack evidence that it was present when the patient entered the healthcare setting, thus meaning it was acquired post-admission.
Medical gloves are disposable gloves used during medical examinations and procedures to help prevent cross-contamination between caregivers and patients. Medical gloves are made of different polymers including latex, nitrile rubber, polyvinyl chloride and neoprene; they come unpowdered, or powdered with corn starch to lubricate the gloves, making them easier to put on the hands.
White coat hypertension (WHT), more commonly known as white coat syndrome, is a form of labile hypertension in which people exhibit a blood pressure level above the normal range in a clinical setting, although they do not exhibit it in other settings. It is believed that the phenomenon is due to anxiety experienced during a clinic visit.
The white coat ceremony (WCC) is a ritual in some schools of medicine and other health-related fields that marks the student's transition from the study of preclinical to clinical health sciences. At some schools, where students begin meeting patients early in their education, the white coat ceremony is held before the first year begins. It is an example of a matriculation. The ritual is a recent invention, first being popularized in the 1990s.
Asepsis is the state of being free from disease-causing micro-organisms. There are two categories of asepsis: medical and surgical. The modern day notion of asepsis is derived from the older antiseptic techniques, a shift initiated by different individuals in the 19th century who introduced practices such as the sterilizing of surgical tools and the wearing of surgical gloves during operations. The goal of asepsis is to eliminate infection, not to achieve sterility. Ideally, a surgical field is sterile, meaning it is free of all biological contaminants, not just those that can cause disease, putrefaction, or fermentation. Even in an aseptic state, a condition of sterile inflammation may develop. The term often refers to those practices used to promote or induce asepsis in an operative field of surgery or medicine to prevent infection.
A medical specialty is a branch of medical practice that is focused on a defined group of patients, diseases, skills, or philosophy. Examples include those branches of medicine that deal exclusively with children (paediatrics), cancer (oncology), laboratory medicine (pathology), or primary care. After completing medical school or other basic training, physicians or surgeons and other clinicians usually further their medical education in a specific specialty of medicine by completing a multiple-year residency to become a specialist.
Health technology is defined by the World Health Organization as the "application of organized knowledge and skills in the form of devices, medicines, vaccines, procedures, and systems developed to solve a health problem and improve quality of lives". This includes pharmaceuticals, devices, procedures, and organizational systems used in the healthcare industry, as well as computer-supported information systems. In the United States, these technologies involve standardized physical objects, as well as traditional and designed social means and methods to treat or care for patients.
A Medical Laboratory Scientist (MLS) or Clinical Laboratory Scientist (CLS) or Medical Technologist (MT) performs diagnostic testing of blood and body fluids in clinical laboratories. The scope of a medical laboratory scientist's work begins with the receipt of patient or client specimens and terminates with the delivery of test results to physicians and other healthcare providers. The utility of clinical diagnostic testing relies squarely on the validity of test methodology. To this end, much of the work done by medical laboratory scientists involves ensuring specimen quality, interpreting test results, data-logging, testing control products, performing calibration, maintenance, validation, and troubleshooting of instrumentation as well as performing statistical analyses to verify the accuracy and repeatability of testing. Medical laboratory scientists may also assist healthcare providers with test selection and specimen collection and are responsible for prompt verbal delivery of critical lab results. Medical Laboratory Scientists in healthcare settings also play an important role in clinical diagnosis. An estimated 70% of medical decisions are based on laboratory test results and MLS contributions affect 95% of a health system's costs.
A medical laboratory or clinical laboratory is a laboratory where tests are conducted out on clinical specimens to obtain information about the health of a patient to aid in diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease. Clinical medical laboratories are an example of applied science, as opposed to research laboratories that focus on basic science, such as found in some academic institutions.
Scrubs, or sometimes Surgical Scrubs, or Nursing Scrubs, are the sanitary clothing worn by physicians, nurses, dentists and other workers involved in patient care. Originally designed for use by surgeons and other operating room personnel, who would put them on when sterilizing themselves, or "scrubbing in", before surgery, they are now worn by many hospital personnel.
A wearable cardioverter defibrillator (WCD) is a non-invasive, external device for patients at risk of sudden cardiac arrest (SCA). It allows physicians time to assess their patient's arrhythmic risk and see if their ejection fraction improves before determining the next steps in patient care. It is a leased device. A summary of the device, its technology and indications was published in 2017 and reviewed by the EHRA Scientific Documents Committee.
Historically, women have made up a large majority of the profession and academic discipline of nursing. Women's nursing roles include both caring for patients and making sure that the wards and equipment are clean. In the United States, women make up the majority of the field of nursing, comprising 86% of Registered Nurses (RNs) in 2021; globally, women comprise 89% of the nursing workforce.
Thomas G. Pickering was a British physician and academic. He was a professor of medicine at College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University Medical Center in New York City. He was an internationally renowned expert in clinical hypertension and a leader in the fields of hypertension and cardiovascular behavioral medicine. He coined the term "white-coat hypertension" to describe those whose blood pressure was elevated in the doctor's office, but normal in everyday life. He later published the first editorial describing "masked hypertension". He also discovered and gave his name to the Pickering Syndrome, where bilateral renal artery stenosis causes flash pulmonary edema.
John I. Gallin is an American medical researcher who has contributed to the understanding of innate immunity but especially chronic granulomatous disease, a phagocyte disorder. Gallin was appointed director of the NIH Clinical Center on May 1, 1994, and served until January 8, 2017. He serves as the chief scientific officer for the Clinical Center and associate director for clinical research at the National Institutes of Health.
Colleen S. Kraft is an infectious disease physician, associate professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, and the director of the Clinical Virology Research Laboratory at Emory University School of Medicine. In 2014, she led Emory University Hospital's effort to treat and care for Ebola virus disease patients and is currently working to address the COVID-19 pandemic in Georgia. She currently serves on Georgia's COVID-19 task force.
Damon Scott Tweedy is an American physician who is an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Duke University School of Medicine. In 2015 Tweedy published his memoir, Black Man in a White Coat: A Doctor's Reflections on Race and Medicine.
