Could Game Theory Help In Tackling PPE Shortages Among Health Care Workers?
The use of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) has seen widespread adoption since the coronavirus hit the globe. The World Health Organization recommends healthcare workers wear surgical masks, goggles, or face shields, gowns, and gloves to be worn as PPE in a bid to reduce the spread of the coronavirus.
In some procedures, healthcare providers can be exposed to aerosols. This is where the N95 or FFP2/3 replaces the surgical mask since it is known to filter 94% of aerosols. And as coronavirus cases continue to skyrocket, the dynamics of PPEs have also followed suit.
As a result, there’s a widespread shortage in countries that desperately need them. As such, there’s been a rapid transmission of the virus from patients to health practitioners which has continued to hamper healthcare service provision.
For this, researchers say that game theory can help address this issue. In a study lead by author, Dr. Luluwah Al-Fagih from Kingston University, U.K, Jean-Christophe Nebel, and colleagues, came up with a game theory model that would help in stock management of PPEs in English National Health Service (NHS) hospitals.
They say that game theory allows for decentralized decision making which can improve the distribution of PPEs. “For instance, they can schedule their orders to minimize their own costs. The decentralized approach leaves the actors with more freedom and is the more applicable direction for our scenario,” the researchers wrote.
In this case, “players” can be organizations, governments, and private firms. The behavior of these actors is encapsulated in a mathematical model that is then solved through an algorithm.
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