Published Mar 24, 2020
TheSquire, DNP, APRN, NP
1,290 Posts
I figure this is more appropriate for here than the "disaster" section, since this is a niche question:
If your urgent care/primary care/whatever office is still seeing patients in-person, what is your standard PPE for office visits. At my urgent care, there's a whole procedure involving contact/droplet precautions for patients presenting with symptoms...and yet the only ones I have sent home for self-isolation are ones who presented with "cough" or other nonspecific complaints where their fever and other symptoms were discovered during the course of the visit.
Right now I'm wearing a surgical mask for all visits (the same one all day - unless the string breaks, which does happen frequently), and wearing gloves for anything involving the eyes or for the one time I collected a nasopharyngeal sample for COVID testing.
This may also be a function of location as well - I practice in a town on a commuter train line that's part of the larger NY-Penn station system, so we're within spitting distance of the nation's current largest outbreak.