How Health Workers Avoid Bringing COVID-19 Home

Updated on August 3, 2020

No one can argue that this is a time when everyone is getting cautious over their health more than ever. The increase of coronavirus or COVID-19 cases is a cause for concern especially to the health-care professionals who battle the pandemic on the frontlines. They keep abreast every day to protect their communities and families, even if they sometimes lack the right equipment to protect themselves.

Worse, plenty of health-care workers not only worry about their health but also their families’. Apart from their loved ones possibly contracting the virus from outside sources, health-care workers themselves have to worry about possibly bringing home the virus.

So how do these professionals avoid bringing COVID-19 home? We discuss the most effective methods below.

Taking care of themselves at the workplace

Health-care professionals take all necessary preventive measures available at a hospital, clinic, and other health-care facility to help reduce the risk and exposure from COVID-19 patients to protect themselves and their loved ones, too. The first and probably most important step to this is not so much what they do when they get home. Instead, it’s the measures they implement at work that are going to count. This means using appropriate precautions when encountering patients.

Health-care workers make sure that anybody who comes into the health-care facility is properly screened for any sort of symptoms and take the necessary action as safely as possible. Furthermore, they make sure to have proper hospital gowns, gloves, droplets protection, and N95 or higher respiratory protection.

Proper handwashing

Apart from being vigilant about their use of personal protective equipment (PPE), health-care professionals must also give importance to proper hand hygiene. Before and after work, it is important for them to wash their hands properly to avoid the further spread or contact of the disease.

While wearing PPE like gloves and masks the right way helps break the chain of infection, hand washing is a precaution that cannot be ignored. Through proper hand hygiene, health-care workers get to remove the virus on the surface of their hands before it has a chance to spread to their body or other surfaces. This makes hand washing one of the most proactive ways for health-care professionals to protect themselves and their families.

Proper sanitation

Most health-care professionals immediately change their clothes when they enter their houses or condo rentals. This allows them to isolate clothes that might have been exposed to the virus outside.

Fortunately, putting work clothes in a normal laundry should take care of things just fine. Generally, the virus sticks to damp, non-porous surfaces, so porous surfaces like cloth and tissue are low-risk. What’s more, most laundry detergents are strong enough to kill whatever germs or viruses stick to clothes.

Social and physical distancing is one of the most recommended precautions against COVID-19. For some health-care workers, this means staying at a rented place and not going home to see their families at all. And while this is good practice, it can be taxing for a health-care worker’s mental health to do their job every day and not see their loved ones. As long as they are taking the right measures mentioned above, going home without bringing the virus is completely possible.

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