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ABOUT US

My duty as a Trauma nurse one rainy evening was to care for a severely injured motor vehicle patient. This person had hit a wall at high speed and was rapidly bleeding out from the massive injuries. The blood was everywhere and soaked the blood pressure cuff. We stabilized the patient and moved him to surgery where he coded. The code lasted an hour and the patient was pronounced dead.

I returned to the same trauma bay and began to care for another motor vehicle victim that had cuts over the upper body from flying glass. The same blood soaked blood pressure cuff from the first patient was wrapped snugly on the arm of this second victim. It struck me immediately that their was direct blood to blood exposure.

Several weeks later the Medical Examiner sent a letter stating that the patient that died had Hepatitis B and HIV. The vehicle hitting the wall was in fact a suicide.

This incident motivated me to invent a protective cover for the blood pressure cuff that would protect my patients from cross contamination. We began manufacturing this cover called Cuff-Guard.

I looked for any research on blood pressure cuff contamination and found many articles. They all had the same theme- blood pressure cuffs were contaminated and often bloody. There is no effective method to disinfect the reusable cuffs and a low cost cover is the only effective barrier for patient to patient contact.

The advent of new drug resistant disease has made it imperative to look at preventing spread of pathogens by contaminated medical equipment. In the event of mass causality or biological/chemical exposure the blood pressure cuff would spread this contamination from patient to patient. Cuff-Guard is a low cost solution to this problem of cuff contamination.

We have also invented an arm sleeve for rescue use to prevent contamination exposure to exposed skin of the arm. We call this product Arm-Guard.

Our cover for tourniquet and vascular cuffs is very economical, and easy to use.