It’s here.
The start of fall doesn’t just mean cooler temperatures, prettier colors, and pumpkin spice. It also means that it’s flu season, an unwelcome annual tradition.
As people spend more time together in close, confined spaces, influenza or the flu, can spread rapidly. More than one billion people globally (and up to 20 percent of US residents) will contract the infectious respiratory virus annually. Tragically, in the US, more than 36,000 people will die from the virus and 200,000 people will be hospitalized, which has cascading healthcare consequences for a sector already inundated with crisis levels of patients presenting in ERs and treatment spaces.
Hospitals and healthcare centers will be hit especially hard.
As the National Library of Medicine reports, healthcare workers experience a high risk of exposure and flu infections. With nearly 19 percent of unvaccinated healthcare workers contracting the virus in a given year, they are 3.4 times more likely than healthy, non-healthcare working adults to contract the virus.
As a result, these employees either continue to work while infected, further spreading the disease to patients or other employees, or they miss work, introducing disruptions in patient services, undermining patient outcomes, and eroding productivity.
Of course, it’s not just flu. COVID-19, the common cold, and other infectious diseases also become more prevalent in the winter.
That’s why it’s time to protect your patients and employees from this year’s flu season. Here are three steps to keep patients and employees healthy during flu season.
#1 Provide the Flu Vaccine as Preventative Care
The Mayo Clinic recommends that everyone six months of age and older receive an annual flu vaccine.
As Dr. Nipunie Rajapakse, a pediatric infectious diseases physician with the Mayo Clinic Children’s Center, notes, “The flu vaccine is one of the most effective ways to reduce the severity of influenza illness and to reduce hospitalizations and deaths.”
The CDC reports that this year’s flu vaccine will be a trivalent flu vaccine, formulated to protect against three flu viruses (an A(H1N1) virus, an A(H3N2) virus, and a B/Victoria virus).
While most health insurance plans cover the flu shot as preventative care, hospitals and healthcare providers can increase total coverage by making it accessible to every employee through in-house vaccination programs, including Environmental Services (EVS) Technicians who may go overlooked by traditional insurance coverage options.
Additionally, consider providing cleansing and disinfection products to support individual hygiene and health. For example, SaniiSwab, a one-minute, self-administered nasal swab cleansing system can help reduce infection risk after exposure. When used regularly, the simple daily nasal cleansing system can eliminate bacteria and viruses in the nasal passage before they have a chance to take hold and cause illness.
#2 Clean and Disinfect All Contact Spaces
Healthcare environments are teeming with infectious diseases that contribute to Healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) that impact more than a million people every year, resulting in 99,000 annual patient deaths and billions of dollars in added costs for healthcare providers.
Flu viruses are no different.
Healthcare providers can help combat their spread by cleaning and disinfecting all contact spaces, including obvious locations, like patient rooms, and less obvious spaces, like break rooms and reception areas.
Healthcare providers can leverage technologies, like Nevoa’s Nimbus, to automate and streamline the disinfection process.
Nimbus, Nevoa’s whole-room fogging technology, is the only patented, hospital-grade surface disinfecting system approved for fogging with EPA-registered hypochlorous acid (HOCl). Nimbus offers several disinfection benefits, including:
- Reaching 100% of surfaces
- Immediate room re-entry
- Zero pathogen transfer and human variability
- Delivers LOG 4-6 EPA registered efficacy
For healthcare providers, Nimbus is a proven disinfection solution that eradicates pathogens on every room surface and helps EVS teams clean more efficiently.
As the Mayo Clinic explains, “regularly clean often-touched surfaces to prevent the spread of infection from touching a surface with the virus on it and then your face.” When paired with fast, effective disinfection methodologies, healthcare providers can stop viral transmission before it starts.
#3 Keep Spaces Clear
Congested waiting rooms and other high-traffic spaces make it more difficult to stop viral infections from spreading among employees and patients.
While disinfection is critical to prevent the spread of infection, crowded waiting rooms, long wait times, and overcrowded treatment spaces make effective infection control measures significantly more challenging.
Unfortunately, many ER and healthcare treatment spaces are continually overcrowded.
Describing the stark conditions in many ER wait rooms, UMass Memorial Health President and CEO Dr. Eric Dickson told Spectrum News, “I’ve practiced emergency medicine in this city for just about 30 years, and I can say without a doubt, we’ve never seen the emergency departments in this city so crowded.”
Rapid and thorough disinfection procedures help reduce turnaround times to optimize the use of treatment areas. In particular, automated disinfection systems expedite this process, allowing for highly efficient sanitization protocols that make more treatment spaces available to more people.
Everyone Working Together
Flu season is upon us. Right now, we can mitigate its impact by preventing the transmission of flu and other infectious agents within healthcare settings. No single solution or individual action will get the job done.
It will require a multifaceted approach in which everyone works together to remain proactive, protected, and productive. This includes widespread vaccination, thorough disinfection practices, and efficient space management.
At Nevoa, we want to partner with you this flu season to help you combat the deadly and disruptive flu viruses that threaten your patients, staff, and operational efficiency. Contact us today to learn more about how we can support your flu protection efforts this season.