The PRIMED difference

Little changes, big impact

The COVID-19 pandemic has shined a new light on an industry that has served as the backbone of protecting healthcare professionals and patients alike for decades. Yet, even before the pandemic, our practices worked to help establish our selection of high quality PPE as a leading choice for healthcare facilities and suppliers looking for an optimal blend of performance, reliability, and price.

Due to our carefully curated supply chain and wholly-owned manufacturing facilities, PRIMED can make changes to products and customize offerings to the exacting needs of nurses, doctors, surgeons, and other healthcare professionals.

This means that PRIMED doesn’t simply design its extensive line of single-use medical masks, medical gowns, shoe coverings, and other PPE with test metrics or cost measures in mind; we also incorporate decades of feedback from professionals working on healthcare frontlines while putting our PPE to use.

Let’s look at a few examples of how we’ve taken customer feedback to help optimize various facets of our PPE and even create custom-tailored solutions for clients looking for something to fill a specific role they couldn’t find anywhere else.

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Extra coverage for easier use

If you’re constantly worried about your PPE’s fit or coverage — or have to make frequent adjustments to your PPE fit or coverage — you won’t be able to focus fully on the task at hand.

This means increased risk and reduced performance. Sometimes even a tiny change in the sizing of PPE can offer significant benefits.

One customer loved our medical gowns but found that their standard sizing came up just a little too short for their preferences.

Since we control every aspect of our PPE production, we used their feedback to create a new gown variation with an additional 11cm of length on the front panel. The change was quick and affordable to implement, and the customer was able to enjoy a product made to address their specific needs.

We had a similar situation with our extended cuff gloves.

Multiple CSR (sterilization)departments found sink work difficult with our standard length  glove designs and asked if longer gloves were available.

Using their feedback, we developed two new products to provide additional length options in our line of extended cuff medical gloves.

In this case, the new products were designs that could provide value to other clinicians and healthcare professionals.

Our ability to work with individual customers to gather feedback and bring new ideas to market rapidly puts us in a unique position.

We can quickly adapt products and address our customers’ needs with greater efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

This efficiency also makes many of these new variations and design changes accessible to other healthcare professionals and suppliers of all sizes.

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A difference you can feel

When it comes to PPE, comfort is essential. But nitrile gloves take this importance to a whole new level.

So much of our ability to work quickly and safely as humans relies on our sense of touch.

Healthcare is no exception.

If a glove doesn’t provide the proper level of tactile feedback or allow natural hand movements, it can reduce a nurse, surgeon, doctor, or lab technician’s ability to do their job.

In contrast, if the glove is too thin or not durable enough for the task, you create unnecessary risk for the worker and patient alike.

Finding that perfect balance is critical.

We’ve seen both sides of these considerations at play.

Once we received feedback that hospital and laboratory phlebotomists found certain gloves too thick for use.

While the gloves offered exceptional tear and splash protection, staff found it hard to detect those subtle signs that help you draw blood quickly and painlessly.

This feedback led to the creation of our Response line of single-use nitrile gloves.

At the time, it was the lightest weight product available.

It provided excellent comfort and improved tactile feedback. We accomplished all of this without sacrificing protection.

To the opposite point, we found that some EMS workers and other professionals who frequently faced unknown situations at a moment’s notice found the standard gloves too thin.

While it’s easier to customize PPE for use in a specific care environment, these professionals didn’t know if they’d be helping secure someone for transport in relatively calm surroundings of their home or working in more hazardous conditions, such as a car accident.

When a call comes in, the PPE available must be ready to face a range of potential scenarios.

As such, a little extra protection is almost always better.

We developed our Extra Strong glove line to address these considerations, providing that extra bit of durability and protection for those who need it.

Finally, while nitrile gloves offer an excellent alternative for those with latex allergies, the accelerators used can sometimes cause skin irritation and allergic reactions.

As such, using feedback from clinicians, we developed an accelerator-free line of nitrile gloves with performance and comfort comparable to our standard nitrile glove options.

Our ability to adapt our gloves and other PPE based on the feedback and needs of healthcare professionals and suppliers allows us to always ensure we’re providing an optimal solution.

In a profession that relies so much on sensory input to make split-second decisions, the importance of this shouldn’t be underestimated.

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On-again, off-again

Medical gowns are a common way to protect both healthcare workers and patients in a variety of medical environments.

As such, even a minor annoyance or inefficiency can add up to a much bigger problem quickly with the sheer number of times you don and doff throughout a workweek.

The belt placement on our gowns is a prime example of this.

We received numerous reports that our gowns were difficult to tie at the back quickly.

Since we’re in control of every step involved in our gowns’ production, we simply moved the belt weld.

This small change made it possible to tie the gown at the front, allowing for easier donning and time savings without compromising coverage.

We also had a customer reach out to ask about our gowns.

After trialing our thumbloop and tie neck elastic cuff gowns, they determined that some situations benefited from different aspects of each design.

Instead of forcing the customer to compromise and choose one which was better overall or stock up on two different designs to blend benefits, we simply created a new variation that combined traits of both gowns trialed.

In creating a tie neck gown with thumbloop cuffs, we addressed all of their concerns, providing a gown that offers an optimal mix of wearability, comfort, and ease of use for their use cases and preferences.

Both of these are examples of how we can use our wholly-owned supply and production chain to rapidly address our customers’ needs in ways that other PPE providers might not have available.

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Behind the mask

Like the rest of our PPE offerings, PRIMED’s range of single-use face mask SKUs optimizes functionality, protection, and comfort for a variety of use cases and medical environments. Using design changes that might not be obvious on the packaging, or even when using the item, we can create a seamless blend of comfort and performance essential to allowing medical professionals to focus on the task at hand.

Even tiny changes can make a huge difference. For example, we found that increasing ear loops on one of our mask designs greatly reduced irritation and headaches for a university hospital experiencing longer-than-average wear times while maintaining the same level of protection.

Another University hospital mentioned that our standard duckbill mask fit too tightly. By adjusting the welding and increasing the size of the mask, we were able to better open the pocket and provide greater comfort during use.

We’ve even worked with retailers to help make packaging customizations to ensure that our PPE would sit securely on existing shelf designs and setups.

However, sometimes the answer doesn’t lie in basic change to an existing SKU. With our network of design, manufacturing, and supply facilities, we can develop PPE designs and make more comprehensive changes to address concise needs and special use environments as well.

One example of this was our work alongside the burn unit in a major hospital in Ontario to create a unique strap-based mask attachment system. Production of the final product required capital equipment investment and multiple rounds of iterative design improvements to create a mask suited to the exacting needs of the burn unit.

Masks have spent significant time throughout 2020 in the media spotlight and will continue to do so in coming years. However, as recent questions about Nanoform Graphene have come to the forefront, it has also become clear to the public and professionals alike that there’s much more to single-use mask safety than the number of layers or overall coverage.

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Key takeaways

• Our carefully selected supply and wholly-owned production chain allows us to rapidly implement design suggestions and feedback and ensure quality     throughout the production process to create PPE solutions tailored to the needs of those using the items every day on the healthcare industry’s  frontlines
• Every facet of your PPE — from glove thickness to gown length to tie placements — will impact the user experience. With the sheer number of times PPE is     donned and doffed in the average hospital or clinic, even saving a few     seconds can add up quickly.
• The ideal PPE will protect while minimizing the impact on tactile feedback, mobility, hand dexterity, and other key characteristics. PRIMED doesn’t just offer solutions that protect healthcare professionals and patients or meet regulatory requirements, but solutions that allow them to work optimally as well.

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PRIMED’s range of single-use medical masks, latex and nitrile gloves, medical gowns, shoe coverings, and other PPE provides comprehensive, reliable protection for healthcare professionals on the frontlines of today’s ever-shifting healthcare environments. Our extensive supply chain expertise and wholly-owned manufacturing facilities gives us full control over and complete transparency during the process to ensure a level of quality, reliability, and customization you can depend on. Contact PRIMED today to explore how we can help meet the demands of your healthcare facility or clinic.

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