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Help your staff to better handle SARS exposure threats

Nurse Leader Weekly, June 6, 2003

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Simple steps, such as safety officers being on a first-name basis with frontline nurses and knowing how to protect yourself against major forms of disease transmission, may be just as effective in battling severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) as clinical knowledge.

That's the message from Saint Joseph's Hospital of Atlanta, which successfully treated Georgia's first victim of SARS. The patient walked into the hospital just before midnight on Friday, March 28, setting off a series of steps to protect health care workers there.

Janet Keen, infection control specialist at Saint Joseph's offers three broad suggestions toward safety awareness and SARS:

1. If faced with a possible SARS case, administrators should rapidly distribute information about protection to everyone involved with patient care.

This not only includes nurses and physicians, but also nonclinical departments, such as environmental services, transportation, security, registration, and engineering. Engineers at Saint Joseph's checked the negative air pressure twice a day in the isolation room used to treat the SARS patient, Keen says.

Hospitals must review protection measures with affected workers so that they're comfortable entering a room with a SARS patient, she adds. The gear used by workers should mirror CDC recommendations.

Frequent reminders to your staff about protection measures are a good idea, too. Caregivers at a Pennsylvania hospital identified a suspected SARS patient two-and-a-half hours after he arrived at the emergency department in April; three workers had unprotected exposures to the man, the CDC reports.

2. Help people understand the disease through confidence and familiarity.

"We don't have all the information about SARS. There's an element of trust" involved in protecting workers, Keen says. "That takes one-on-one interaction [among employees] sometimes."

Facilities can stay ahead of this challenge by encouraging safety and infection control officers and frontline staff members to work together.

Keen says that safety and infection control officers should make frequent stops in the units and get to know the frontline staff members. At Saint Joseph's, unit nurses "know me by first name and by face, and know that I'm available 24/7," she says. When the SARS patient showed up at the hospital, Keen received a call at home at 12:30 a.m. about the arrival.

Anticipate employee questions about their well-being when a SARS case arrives. Hospitals should plan to have infection control specialists, safety officers, nursing managers, or other designated supervisors meet with concerned workers in small groups to discuss information about the illness, reinforce the necessary protection measures, and provide updates on hospital policy changes.

Adapted from: Briefings on Hospital Safety, www.hcmarketplace.com/Prod.cfm?id=45&S=ENMW

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