Visitors Enter Hospitals Everyday, But We Don’t Know Who Is Contagious
With flu season right around the corner, healthcare and in-patient facilities nationwide are taking precautions to prevent their patients from being affected by the illness. It is common practice to require healthcare workers to get the flu shot and consistently wash their hands to control flu spread.
Yet visitors to the hospital who have direct contact with patients, may pose the greatest threat to patient safety if unchecked for fever.
How To Allow Visitors In And Keep Flu Germs Out
Right now, hospitals and in-patient care facilities regularly require visitors to complete a questionnaire before entering patient care areas including NICU’s, emergency rooms and even oncology units. This process requires visitors to “self diagnose” their well state with questions about the past 24 hours and their travel out of the country within the past 30 days, without any physical determination of whether or not they are fevered, the best sign of contagiousness.
The issue with this approach is that healthcare workers are left “trusting visitors’ statements about their well-state” rather than affirming their well-health based on a body temperature below 99.4°. With hundreds, even thousands, of visitors entering everyday, hospitals can rarely justify the cost of having a full time staff person physically scan for fever. Thus, potentially contagious persons enter patient care areas – putting healthcare organizations and their patients at risk of infection spread that can result in Healthcare Acquired Infections (HAI’s).
How Hospitals Use welloStation to Prevent Flu Spread and Common Contagious Infections
WelloStation solves this conundrum by instantly screening visitors and vendors at every entry point within the hospital. To see how this solution overcomes this challenge of potentially infectious persons spreading the flu, view this quick, informational video.
The welloStation is a hands-free, automated infection prevention solution for hospitals, rehabilitation centers, assisted living and any in-patient facility where visitors and vendors may spread contagions. Using welloStation helps improve patient safety by using automation to screen visitors and vendors for fever automatically, thus reducing staff time at intake, HAI exposure and risk.
See How welloStation Works On-Site
For healthcare professionals interested in adding a new tactic to their flu prevention strategies this season we encourage you to schedule a demonstration of welloStation on-site.