Like every critical care health professional, I’ve had many occasions where I’ve struggled to bag, mask, ventilate a patient because they have a beard. I’ve developed a solution to solve that problem. That solution is simple, effective, single-use, and reduces aerosolization of airway secretions, which will help protect our healthcare workers from patient secretions around the world. Introducing the SAM Safety Seal for Guedel and bite block brought to you by Scott Airway Management.

When a patient becomes unconscious, they need a healthcare worker to breathe for them to keep them alive. This happens at the beginning of every general anesthetic or if you become unconscious for another reason. For example, you’ve had a heart attack. To breathe for a patient who is unconscious, the healthcare professional must create a seal between this, a mask, and the patient’s face. This allows us to create enough pressure to overcome the resistance of the airways, lungs, and chest wall and force oxygen into the patient’s lungs.So facial hair prevents the seal being created between the mask and the face. And as such is extremely difficult or even impossible to ventilate a bearded patient. The result is insufficient oxygenation risking a patient’s life during this critical stage of an anesthetic procedure. If a patient is unconscious and the healthcare professional can’t breathe for them, the patient’s life may be placed at risk. The oxygen concentration in the blood will drop rapidly, starving the brain, heart, and other vital organs of what they need to survive. Healthcare professionals are currently forced to utilize unapproved methods to create a seal on a bearded patient that will get most patients through this, but it is unnecessarily stressful and dangerous.

The SAM Safety Seal solves this problem. Scott Airway Management has been developing this device for a number of years, working with healthcare professionals to create the design. During the in-market design validation, feedback from health care professionals also link the SAM Safety Seal to assisting in the reduction of aerosolization of airway secretions from patients in this and other areas of medicine like endoscopy, bronchoscopy, and transesophageal echocardiogram. It’s a flexible contoured device made of silicon. It’s easy to use, single-use, latex-free, and TGA approved.

In the COVID era, the market and the urgency for the device has increased. We know that masks and physical distancing help to reduce transmission rates of COVID-19. But when patients enter the operating theater, neither of these measures are possible as healthcare providers need to have direct access to the patients without a mask, and they need to be very close to them. The SAM Safety Seal provides that extra layer of protection between the patient and the healthcare professional when masks and physical distancing aren’t possible. This is why I invented and developed the SAM Safety Seal for Guedel and bite block.