As an employer, it’s essential that you do everything you can to keep your employees safe. Most employers do take steps to protect their employees from injuries. However, very few take steps to protect employees from illnesses.
Keeping your staff illness-free is more important than ever, especially when you consider the fact we have just come out of a pandemic that claimed the lives of millions of people.
In a hospital setting, it’s even more important to keep employees safe. This post will tell you how you can do that:
Personal Protective Equipment
Personal protective equipment is one of the most effective ways of protecting your employees from viruses, illnesses, and bacteria. According to the experts over at Only Nitrile Gloves, wearing gloves is one good way of keeping people safe. It’s also a good idea to encourage staff to wear masks. However, masks only stop people from breathing viral particles out, they do not stop people from breathing them in. Because of this, it’s also a good idea to ask the patients coming into your hospital or surgery to wear masks as well.
Regular Testing
Regular testing is a good idea, as well. In a healthcare setting, it’s going to be impossible to totally prevent employees from picking up viruses and illnesses. However, by testing them regularly, you will be able to isolate infected employees and keep them away from uninfected ones. Testing and isolating will help you to keep your workforce in good health, and ensure they are fit to work. If one employee picks up a virus and isn’t tested, then they could spread it to everybody else. If a virus is spread, people will have to stay at home and won’t be able to work.
Vaccine Mandates
Vaccine mandates are another highly effective way of protecting your employees. Ensuring that everybody is vaccinated will stop people from getting seriously ill if they do pick up a virus. At the moment, the COVID-19 vaccine is a good one to get, as is the flu vaccine. This year’s flu season is predicted to be the worst in generations, mainly due to the fact that people were at home isolating for the majority of last year and lost their natural immunity against common viruses. Vaccine mandates will keep you, your employees, and your patients safe.
Priority Levels
If you are in charge of a hospital or doctor’s surgery, you should rank patients according to the severity of their illness, infection, or injury. There should be a separate category for people who’re seeking help with a virus. This is so that you can keep those patients away from other patients, and take steps to ensure that they do not transmit their viruses to any of your staff. Patients who’re identified as having some kind of virus can be sat in a separate room and can be given personal protective equipment to wear.
You need to keep your health workers safe. If you do not, then they could get sick. If they do, they might not be able to come to work. Health workers are needed more than ever right now, so you need to protect yours at all costs.