Business View Magazine | November 2020

11 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE NOVEMBER 2020 KEEPING YOUR EMPLOYEES SAFE: VALUE OF DIGITAL ENVIRONMENTAL ROUNDING A s we continue to deliver quality and compassionate care during this COVID pandemic, ensuring the safety of your employees is an upmost priority. A focus of this magnitude should be led by senior management, however, everyone in the organization must actively engage in order to “be safe.” In this review, we will overview a digital rounding strategy for monitoring and mitigating COVID-19 type safety concerns in your healthcare organization. Let us set the foundation by defining how COVID-19 impacts the safety of your employees. According to the World Health Organization: “When someone who has COVID-19 coughs or exhales they release droplets of infected fluid. Most of these droplets fall on nearby surfaces and objects - such as desks, tables, or telephones. People could catch COVID-19 by touching contaminated surfaces or objects – and then touching their eyes, nose or mouth. If they are standing within one meter of a person with COVID-19, they can catch it by breathing in droplets coughed out or exhaled by them. In other words, COVID-19 spreads in a similar way to flu.” Rounding within the work environment to capture employee perceptions on a variety of issues is a standard practice in healthcare. It is not uncommon to see organizations capturing these rounds with pen and paper. However, digital rounding takes advantage of today’s technology and replaces pen and paper with electronic forms for tracking and trending valuable information. Efficiencies are immediately realized through a decreased amount of time spent on documenting, trending and communicating your findings. An effective COVID 19-employee safety digital rounding strategy should enable you to monitor and mitigate the primary safety issues of your business unit. Keep in mind that a typical acute care patient unit is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Employees will work multiple days and shifts; therefore, rounding should be rotated by day and shift in order to ensure continuous monitoring. Once the frequency is established, rounding needs to target the areas of opportunity for keeping your employees safe. As a starting point, consider the following questions for inclusion within your digital rounding platform. OPENING L INES