MIDDLETOWN, Ohio — Every time Dr. Tina Kummerle walks into the ER, she’s suited up to fight the virus. But now she’s taking it one step further with what looks like a simple plastic box.
- The “Intubation Box” would fit over patients
- It’s designed to protect hospital staff if a patient coughs anything up during an intubation procedure
- It’s being used so far in Premiere hospitals
“It goes at the head of the bed, the patient would be laying here, it has two openings for you to insert your hands here,” said Kummerle.
Called the “Intubation Box,” she says it's keeping health care workers from getting sick.
“I have access to the airway and then I would ask the nurse, she would need the tube, so she would open that door, hand the tube in, and then close the door back up, and then allow me to insert the endotracheal tube into that airway,” said Kummerle.
She says they have to do this when patients get so sick with the coronavirus that they can’t breathe. They have to put a tube down the mouth to the lungs to create an airway. The box is keeping whatever the patient coughs up from getting into their faces.
“This is during the procedure, which is the riskiest procedure, that it’s gonna give us that extra protection,” said Kummerle.
So far, they’re using the boxes at Atrium Medical Center in Middletown and so far, she says it’s working.
“There’s still gonna be a risk of exposure, but this is gonna decrease that risk by a significant amount, I would say at least by about 70 to 80 percent,” said Kummerle.
They’ve been using it for the last three weeks after she came up with the idea. She says she saw an early prototype of it in Taiwan. That’s when she and her husband got to work.
“I pitched the idea to my husband, who worked with his engineering team to design the box and then we found a local company out in Franklin who was able to manufacture the box for us,” said Kummerle.
It was all paid for with donated time and material, and now there are plans to get the box to other Premiere Health hospitals as another way to fight this virus.