Temperature checks for Employees

Nurses COVID

Published

Specializes in ICU.

Does your hospital check temperatures for employees to work?

Are they consistent or only sporadic?

Some days, only at high volume times one or two people are assigned to check employees' temperature, besides these rare times, people pass through unchecked at my facility.

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Specializes in Pediatrics, Pediatric Float, PICU, NICU.

My facility checks every single employee, patient, and visitor temperatures upon entry into the building. At this time they are also asked covid-19 screening questions related to travel, symptoms, and exposure. If you are cleared on both the screening questions and temperature check, you get a face mask and a wrist band to show you've been screened. If you have a temperature or don't pass one of the screening questions, you are not able to come into the facility.

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Specializes in Medical and general practice now LTC.
43 minutes ago, JadedCPN said:

My facility checks every single employee, patient, and visitor temperatures upon entry into the building. At this time they are also asked covid-19 screening questions related to travel, symptoms, and exposure. If you are cleared on both the screening questions and temperature check, you get a face mask and a wrist band to show you've been screened. If you have a temperature or don't pass one of the screening questions, you are not able to come into the facility.

We do the same except use a wrist band. It has only been in the last week we have let outside contractors in. We have started resident visits but outside and visitors still go through the screening

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Specializes in OR, Nursing Professional Development.

Every person entering gets screened. When it started they did wristbands (great for infection control, right?) then moved to putting the bands on badges then eliminated bands altogether. Visitors get a name tag that says screened and the date.

It started with manual temps, and staff quickly learned to come in several minutes earlier due to the backlogs. Now it’s moving to automated where you step in front of the device and it’ll tell you if you’re good.

Only certain entrances are open- others have been locked down. We have one employee entrance and then the main hospital entrance open. All others are now emergency exit only.

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On 6/22/2020 at 8:42 AM, JadedCPN said:

My facility checks every single employee, patient, and visitor temperatures upon entry into the building. At this time they are also asked covid-19 screening questions related to travel, symptoms, and exposure. If you are cleared on both the screening questions and temperature check, you get a face mask and a wrist band to show you've been screened. If you have a temperature or don't pass one of the screening questions, you are not able to come into the facility.

Same (except we get stickers for our badges--wristbands seem like an infection control risk...)

Our 'touchless' infared temp screening is kind of a joke--my temp usually reads about 93-95 degrees (so, dead?) I'm sure if somebody actually had a fever of 102, the thermometer would only register as 98-99. Still, this allows the hospital to be 'compliant' and say that they checked. ?

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Specializes in Critical Care; Cardiac; Professional Development.

We are doing temperature readings at the front doors of anyone who enters - but there remain several employee entrance areas where screening is not being done. They are using the infrared thermometers and I read consistently as being around 95.8, which is laughable. It's not even remotely accurate. We are having a big surge here in Dallas. Employee entrances are being centralized and several of them locked so that screening is more consistent, but if we are screening in a way that doesn't give accurate measures, I guess I don't understand the point.

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Specializes in ED, psych.
11 hours ago, adventure_rn said:

Same (except we get stickers for our badges--wristbands seem like an infection control risk...)

Our 'touchless' infared temp screening is kind of a joke--my temp usually reads about 93-95 degrees (so, dead?) I'm sure if somebody actually had a fever of 102, the thermometer would only register as 98-99. Still, this allows the hospital to be 'compliant' and say that they checked. ?

I got 92.4 the other day and they were content to let me sail right on by. I stood there for a sec and the lady was just staring right back at me ...

Maybe she just was staring through me ... I’m a ghost and don’t know it.

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On 6/25/2020 at 2:45 PM, pixierose said:

I got 92.4 the other day and they were content to let me sail right on by. I stood there for a sec and the lady was just staring right back at me ...

Maybe she just was staring through me ... I’m a ghost and don’t know it.

I'm sorry that was hilarious!! Same thing is happening where I work, the "receptionist" takes our temps. They have no idea what is normal or out of range. It's absolutely laughable LOL

Stay safe x ❤️

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Specializes in ICU.

I just found out that at my facility it is OK to work with a recent positive covid test as long as you are asymptomatic.

I have heard that this is similar to the policy at local hospitals and in alignment with the CDC recommendations.

How do we hope that civilians do better than trained professionals to minimize the spread of this deadly disease.

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Specializes in NICU, PICU, Transport, L&D, Hospice.
6 hours ago, travelingrn2001 said:

I just found out that at my facility it is OK to work with a recent positive covid test as long as you are asymptomatic.

I have heard that this is similar to the policy at local hospitals and in alignment with the CDC recommendations.

How do we hope that civilians do better than trained professionals to minimize the spread of this deadly disease.

Why limit working to just the asymptomatic? I really want to just laugh at the absurdity...

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Specializes in ER.

One of my extremely lucrative Covid contract was taking temps of construction workers who were building a Microsoft cloud storage facility in Washington State.

The contractor hired 5 nurses through a staffing agency. We were using these totally inaccurate infrared scanners. It was March, so many were reading 'low' or hypothermic.

There was lots of intrigue and a gag order imposed on us by the crazy occupational health nurse who had already been out there. Don't talk to Clayco (the general contractor) and never talk to anyone from Microsoft!

They obviously wanted to hide the fact that they were paying a fortune for a useless exercise in futility.

Then they had to shut the whole operation down because of a couple positive cases. We got paid anyways and I went on to a real covid-19 contract in an ER in western Washington.

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10 hours ago, travelingrn2001 said:

I just found out that at my facility it is OK to work with a recent positive covid test as long as you are asymptomatic.

I have heard that this is similar to the policy at local hospitals and in alignment with the CDC recommendations.

How do we hope that civilians do better than trained professionals to minimize the spread of this deadly disease.

This is why so many health care workers are becoming ill. That's an absurd policy.

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