PPE situation in your clinic

Specialties NP

Published

Specializes in Urgent Care NP, Emergency Nursing, Camp Nursing.

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.

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