Background Emergency care staff wearing elastomeric respiratory personal protective equipment (PPE) report difficulties in communicating by telephone. We developed and tested an affordable technological solution aimed at improving telephone call intelligibility for staff wearing PPE.

Methods A novel headset was created to enable a throat microphone and bone conduction headset to be used in combination with a standard hospital ‘emergency alert’ telephone system. Speech intelligibility of an ED staff member wearing PPE was compared between the proposed headset and current practice by simultaneously recording a version of the Modified Rhyme Test and a Key Sentences Test. Recordings were played back to a group of blinded ED staff listening to pairs of recordings under identical conditions. The proportion of correctly identified words was compared using a paired t-test.

Results Fifteen ED staff correctly identified a mean of 73% (SD 9%) words for speech communicated via the throat microphone system, compared with only 43% (SD 11%) of words for standard practice (paired t-test, p<0.001).

Conclusions Introduction of a suitable headset could significantly improve speech intelligibility during ‘emergency alert’ telephone calls.