Receptionist and guest wearing face mask at front desk while having conversation in office or hospital . Covid 19 and coronavirus infection protection and protective policy concept .
Pandemic or not, it is vital for healthcare facilities to be places where people can come without getting sick. To do this, though, multiple precautions must be taken to prevent the spread of illness as much as possible. Fortunately, many of these precautions are fairly easy to implement as long as the staff at the facility correctly follow the necessary procedures. To get a complete picture of what you need to be doing at your facility, here are a few ways that you can help keep your patients and staff healthy.
Take Care of Filters
Most healthcare facilities are equipped with a high-quality filtering system to reduce the spread of airborne viruses. For these machines to work properly, though, it’s important to keep the filters clean. If you don’t have a contract with an HVAC company to take care of this task, it’s vital that you assign a specific person within your organization to take care of filter replacement on a regular basis. Additionally, make sure that you keep a stock of the correct filters on-hand at all times.
Check Temperatures
Since fever is a symptom of many types of illnesses, it’s a great idea to have a temperature scanning kiosk in place at your facility. This will help you screen individuals who come into your facility so that they don’t unknowingly spread an illness to other individuals using the facility. To ensure that the kiosk is effective, it’s vital to put into place policies that dictate what to do when someone comes in with a fever, whether that’s sending them home or sending them to another part of your facility.
Provide Separate Facilities
In many cases, individuals come to a healthcare facility precisely because they have some type of illness that they need assistance with. To protect healthy people from the germs of sick people, it’s best to provide separate areas in your facility for these two groups to congregate. Putting physical barriers in place between these areas will greatly reduce the number of germs that are transmitted, meaning your risk of becoming the epicenter of an outbreak is significantly reduced.
Schedule Appropriately
Something else to consider when it comes to reducing the spread of illness is to think through how you schedule patient appointments. Make sure that you’re providing enough time between appointments so that your office doesn’t become overcrowded, which would make disease transmission almost certain. If you have a small office and need to have people wait outside to help lower the risk, this is something else to consider when you think through how patients will move through your facility.
Evaluate Constantly
Of course, even after you’ve implemented smart strategies to help reduce disease transmission, it’s still important to evaluate your progress. There is almost always room for improvement in this vital area, meaning that you should always be thinking through even the smallest details. Over time, you’ll be able to get into a comfortable workflow so that everyone in your facility can have an enjoyable and safe experience.
