A letter was written by American Medical Council (AMA) to Vice President Pence and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), urging immediate action to address ongoing shortages and access issues related to personal protective equipment (PPE) in ambulatory settings. In the letter to the vice president, the AMA asked the administration to activate the Defense Production Act as a matter of patient safety. Physicians are telling the AMA the biggest challenge to reopening their practices is the ongoing shortages of PPE, especially N95 masks and gowns. The AMA also wrote to FEMA about the difficulty in solving the PPE problem in physician practices, citing a lack of data to determine whether the central problem is in the availability of raw materials, production backlogs, gaps in the distribution systems, or some combination of all three. The administration has not provided information on PPE access for physician offices, and no agency appears to be working to resolve this problem. The AMA urges FEMA to work with us to provide additional assistance to these non-hospital physicians in securing PPE, disinfectants, and sanitizers.
(Credits: www.ama-assn.org)