Should hospitals inform patients and family that COVID positives nurses and staff may be working on a unit?

Nurses COVID

Updated:   Published

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Not tell them that a specific employee is working, but that they may be come into contact with an employee who is positive for COVID.

Specializes in BSN, RN, CVRN-BC.

No!  However, if you think that a colleague has COVID19 and isn't taking the appropriate test you do have a duty to report this up the chain of command.

People can be exposed to COVID19 at a grocery store or any place else for that matter.  Don't use the patients as pawns for some agenda.  If you think that some isn't following guidelines or is in denial about COVID19 symptoms take it to your team lead, manager, infection prevention rep, Ect.

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Specializes in Psych, Addictions, SOL (Student of Life).
2 minutes ago, Robmoo said:

No!  However, if you think that a colleague has COVID19 and isn't taking the appropriate test you do have a duty to report this up the chain of command.

People can be exposed to COVID19 at a grocery store or any place else for that matter.  Don't use the patients as pawns for some agenda.  If you think that some isn't following guidelines or is in denial about COVID19 symptoms take it to your team lead, manager, infection prevention rep, Ect.

We've got a security guard whose job it is to take temps and ask "Have you been exposed to Covid 19?" I always jokingly answer "I'm sure I have!"

Hppy

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Specializes in BSN, RN, CVRN-BC.
11 minutes ago, hppygr8ful said:

We've got a security guard whose job it is to take temps and ask "Have you been exposed to Covid 19?" I always jokingly answer "I'm sure I have!"

Hppy

They quit asking us if we've been exposed and switched to just asking if we were having any symptoms.  

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Specializes in Cardiac.
On 1/18/2022 at 6:11 PM, nursej22 said:

Should the hospital inform patients and family that MRSA positive staff may be on the unit? Should we tell them that many of the surfaces in a hospital likely have pathogens? Should we tell them when they sit on the floor that people are often incontinent on the floor? 

MRSA is not causing a pandemic.

 

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Specializes in Family and Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner.
On 1/20/2022 at 12:43 PM, hppygr8ful said:

While I don't think it is the CDC's intention to encourage contagious people back to work these new "Recommendations" are a clear capitulation to lobbyists for corporate medicine to keep hospitals staffed and profits rolling in.

This. Early in the pandemic, several politicians were quoted as saying that the elderly in particular should be grateful to give their lives so that their grandchildren would continue to go to school, work, have an economy, etc. (All while said politicians took actions to protect themselves.) Focus on the economy. Value of things was placed over lives. This continues today. We must continue to produce for our late-stage capitalist oligarchy!

During the Spanish Flu pandemic, an already existing eugenics movement took on greater prominence socially. Those who were considered "feeble", weak, intellectually or physically disabled, or just chronically ill, regardless of their work or social status, were considered a drag on society. We absolutely have seen this in full swing in the past two years, whether in Congress or on Main Street. We've also sadly seen this in our own hospitals when discussing treatment and withholding or attempting to withhold treatment for quad and paraplegic or otherwise disabled (particularly intellectually disabled) patients with the assumption that their overall quality of life is already poor. Likewise, we've seen it with our own anti-vax, anti-mask colleagues.

The CDC, just like the FDA, is not necessarily by its design present to serve the people as it is systems. The primary system it's designed to serve is the country as a whole (and not really individual safety). But predominantly they're present to preserve the economy which is now the de facto ruler of this country. (And with regards to AIDS, the CDC only addressed the HIV/AID crisis due to the constant disruptions by groups like ActUP, which made it almost impossible for the CDC to ignore. (Remember that eventually the entertainment industry became a threat to the economy as they became involved in the AIDS movement...)

We live in an ableist society, one that favors money over people. Our medical industrial complex is really no different. We providers, nurses, etc., are cogs in the wheel, happily sacrificed to keep the money rolling in for management elites and investors, and our patients, particularly those most vulnerable, are no different.

COVID exposed the existing fault lines in our healthcare, economy, democracy, and even our supply chain. It also showed a lot of us that the disabled and immunocompromised are considered by an awful lot of Americans to be disposable, something the disabled community won't soon forget.

I can understand a knee-jerk response to support the CDC, itself a response to anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers who do everything they can to undermine anything positive the CDC does. However, the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend, whether internationally or domestically. We are sacrificing the vulnerable every day to placate corporatists, investors, the plutocracy of this country, in addition to an increasingly frightening far-right fascistic movement.

In a country in free-fall, I'll criticize the CDC as far as I see fit. If you're healthy and low risk, you probably don't see the issue. However, as someone at high risk, trying to do my job and serve others, I can quite clearly see how the system and even many of my colleagues see my life as disposable. Our healthcare facilities aren't even enforcing masking!

Please tell me again how this isn't willful human sacrifice. If Bin Laden had killed over 800,000 Americans, I kind of think there would have been a more pointed response.

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Specializes in Family and Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner.
On 1/20/2022 at 2:57 PM, macawake said:

I don’t think that corporate profits is what’s primarily behind the new recommendations. Changes in recommendations similar to the CDC’s regarding isolation or quarantine for healthcare workers and other vital personnel after exposure to or infection with Covid, are being made in many countries around the world that are currently experiencing an Omicron tsunami. It’s the same in countries with single-payer healthcare, 

It was publicly admitted by the administration that guidelines absolutely had to be changed due to "constraints" and pressures on the health care system due to high rates of infections of health care workers. True, this has been the case in single-payer countries, but then again, those countries haven't had the outrageous rates of infections and deaths that the US has.

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Specializes in OB.

At our facility, HCW are evaluated at 5 days and must return to work if they are asymptomatic or mild but must wear an N95 AT ALL TIMES while at work for 5 more days and a special orange zone break room has been created by converting a classroom. This is the only place an infected employee can unmask to eat/drink/etc where there might be other people. 

If a HCW is too sick to work at 5 days, they are evaluated again at 7 days (2 days later), and same work requirements. And we are covered under covid compensation only during this time. Any days after this will come out of our PTO. This is a radical change from the approach up until now. Several people were out for weeks and months because of how sick the virus made them and they were covered the entire time. 

It will be my luck to catch it now after two years of successfully avoiding it. 

And yeah, I worry about patients getting hospital-acquired illness from either ill nurses or from visitors not following policy properly. 

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Specializes in Psych, Addictions, SOL (Student of Life).
1 hour ago, Victoria Weber said:

At our facility, HCW are evaluated at 5 days and must return to work if they are asymptomatic or mild but must wear an N95 AT ALL TIMES while at work for 5 more days and a special orange zone break room has been created by converting a classroom. This is the only place an infected employee can unmask to eat/drink/etc where there might be other people. 

If a HCW is too sick to work at 5 days, they are evaluated again at 7 days (2 days later), and same work requirements. And we are covered under covid compensation only during this time. Any days after this will come out of our PTO. This is a radical change from the approach up until now. Several people were out for weeks and months because of how sick the virus made them and they were covered the entire time. 

It will be my luck to catch it now after two years of successfully avoiding it. 

And yeah, I worry about patients getting hospital-acquired illness from either ill nurses or from visitors not following policy properly. 

Based on the new guidelines and employer cannot make/force you back to work

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Specializes in oncology.
1 hour ago, BuckeyeNP said:

(And with regards to AIDS, the CDC only addressed the HIV/AID crisis due to the constant disruptions by groups like ActUP, which made it almost impossible for the CDC to ignore. (Remember that eventually the entertainment industry became a threat to the economy as they became involved in the AIDS movement...)

I believe you are too young to actually know about the AIDS epidemic first hand. I am old enough that I lived through it through the terms of 'GRID' and other terms used before HIV and AIDS became permanent names.  Gays were active in their communities and politics, giving freely to political campaigns. These actions brought the attention to the new infection that it deserved.

Prior to AIDS, the CDC was going to be shut down as many thought it had outlived it's purpose. Instead the CDC took on the early work on identifying the source of transmission of the infection. Hollywood and/or the entertainment industry kept AIDS in the forefront with the red ribbons but were not known for big financial contributions for the important that needed to be done. 

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Specializes in BSN, RN, CVRN-BC.
20 hours ago, BuckeyeNP said:

This. Early in the pandemic, several politicians were quoted as saying that the elderly in particular should be grateful to give their lives so that their grandchildren would continue to go to school, work, have an economy, etc. (All while said politicians took actions to protect themselves.) Focus on the economy. Value of things was placed over lives. This continues today. We must continue to produce for our late-stage capitalist oligarchy!

During the Spanish Flu pandemic, an already existing eugenics movement took on greater prominence socially. Those who were considered "feeble", weak, intellectually or physically disabled, or just chronically ill, regardless of their work or social status, were considered a drag on society. We absolutely have seen this in full swing in the past two years, whether in Congress or on Main Street. We've also sadly seen this in our own hospitals when discussing treatment and withholding or attempting to withhold treatment for quad and paraplegic or otherwise disabled (particularly intellectually disabled) patients with the assumption that their overall quality of life is already poor. Likewise, we've seen it with our own anti-vax, anti-mask colleagues.

The CDC, just like the FDA, is not necessarily by its design present to serve the people as it is systems. The primary system it's designed to serve is the country as a whole (and not really individual safety). But predominantly they're present to preserve the economy which is now the de facto ruler of this country. (And with regards to AIDS, the CDC only addressed the HIV/AID crisis due to the constant disruptions by groups like ActUP, which made it almost impossible for the CDC to ignore. (Remember that eventually the entertainment industry became a threat to the economy as they became involved in the AIDS movement...)

We live in an ableist society, one that favors money over people. Our medical industrial complex is really no different. We providers, nurses, etc., are cogs in the wheel, happily sacrificed to keep the money rolling in for management elites and investors, and our patients, particularly those most vulnerable, are no different.

COVID exposed the existing fault lines in our healthcare, economy, democracy, and even our supply chain. It also showed a lot of us that the disabled and immunocompromised are considered by an awful lot of Americans to be disposable, something the disabled community won't soon forget.

I can understand a knee-jerk response to support the CDC, itself a response to anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers who do everything they can to undermine anything positive the CDC does. However, the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend, whether internationally or domestically. We are sacrificing the vulnerable every day to placate corporatists, investors, the plutocracy of this country, in addition to an increasingly frightening far-right fascistic movement.

In a country in free-fall, I'll criticize the CDC as far as I see fit. If you're healthy and low risk, you probably don't see the issue. However, as someone at high risk, trying to do my job and serve others, I can quite clearly see how the system and even many of my colleagues see my life as disposable. Our healthcare facilities aren't even enforcing masking!

Please tell me again how this isn't willful human sacrifice. If Bin Laden had killed over 800,000 Americans, I kind of think there would have been a more pointed response.

Gov Cuomo took it one step further and mandated that nursing homes had to accept COVID19 positive patients.  Nothing like cleaning out the nursing homes for the sake of "the future."  Sweden took a similar approach.  But that is a topic for a different thread.

To address the wider scope of you post, it come down to the same old problem of how much freedom are you willing to give up for safety and security.  It isn't in the nature of Americans to give up a large amount of freedom for a small increase in security (safety).  We chose a mid-course between those nations who totally locked down and countries such as Sweden who took few precautions.  Some early predictions placed the number of deaths that our nation would suffer at 2 million.  We have so far been able to keep under half that number.

 

 

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1 hour ago, Robmoo said:

Gov Cuomo took it one step further and mandated that nursing homes had to accept COVID19 positive patients.  Nothing like cleaning out the nursing homes for the sake of "the future."  Sweden took a similar approach.  But that is a topic for a different thread.

To address the wider scope of you post, it come down to the same old problem of how much freedom are you willing to give up for safety and security.  It isn't in the nature of Americans to give up a large amount of freedom for a small increase in security (safety).  We chose a mid-course between those nations who totally locked down and countries such as Sweden who took few precautions.  Some early predictions placed the number of deaths that our nation would suffer at 2 million.  We have so far been able to keep under half that number.

 

 

Nah. The Patriot Act was evidence that fearful or otherwise emotionally motivated or manipulated Americans are often eager to dispose of the freedoms of the American population, including their own.  The "marketing" is an important piece of this discussion.  

Pandemic mitigation refusals aren't about freedom, that's just the marketing pitch. 

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On 1/26/2022 at 6:11 PM, BuckeyeNP said:

It was publicly admitted by the administration that guidelines absolutely had to be changed due to "constraints" and pressures on the health care system due to high rates of infections of health care workers. True, this has been the case in single-payer countries, but then again, those countries haven't had the outrageous rates of infections and deaths that the US has.

It’s a mixed bag really.. some countries around the world with single-payer and/or universal healthcare have had significantly lower number of cases and lower per capita Covid mortality than the U.S., several have had much higher and many other are about the same as the U.S. 

Out of the top ten countries with the highest Covid mortality, eight or nine are Eastern European. (nine if you count Georgia as European, eight of you place it in Asia). Belgium, Italy and the UK aren’t that far behind the U.S. Not that this is a contest. My point is that Covid has severely impacted many countries on several continents. 
 

Global case and mortality statistics if you want to take a look: 
 

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

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