How Home Care Professionals Can Protect Themselves and Their Clients From COVID

The COVID-19 pandemic has created additional challenges for home care professionals. Extra precautions have had to be taken to keep yourself and your clients safe from infection, and some of these added precautions will likely remain in place well after the pandemic has passed. If you work as a home care professional, here are some smart ways to protect yourself and your clients from COVID-19.

Consider Televisits

Not every patient care concern requires an in-person visit, and you can limit your exposure to people who possibly have COVID-19 by scheduling televisits online. The best video conferencing programs allow you to talk and see patients through a computer screen. General questions or minor concerns can often be addressed through televisits, which can also save you time and allow you to care for more patients. Initial consultations with new patients to discuss individualized care plans can also usually be arranged through televisits.

Disinfect with Greater Diligence

Even if you think that you’re already disinfecting yourself and items that you touch enough, there are likely ways that you can disinfect even more to kill the COVID-19 virus along with other germs and viruses that can cause serious illnesses. Using hand sanitizer or washing your hands with a strong antibacterial soap every time that you touch an object, a surface or a person and wearing gloves can decrease the chances of infection significantly. Professional cleaners who specialize in providing coronavirus disinfection services can clean areas around a home even more thoroughly.

Create Barriers

Although this may seem difficult to do in another person’s home, you can try finding ways to create barriers that offer an extra level of protection between you and patients. There are mobile partitions that can be brought to various locations and set up easily to limit exposure when you don’t need to be physically touching a patient. You’ll also want to wear personal protective equipment (PPE), such as gloves, masks and suits, as often as possible, for greater protection.

Train Colleagues

You can do a service for your industry and prevent the spread of COVID-19 among other home health care workers and their patients by providing training. The knowledge that you acquire about how to keep yourself safeguarded against diseases better on the job can be passed onto colleagues. Training can be especially good for new home health care providers who are entering the field. If you’re unable to provide the training yourself, you can recommend that your company offers some type of comprehensive training plan if it already hasn’t done so.

You can do your part in minimizing the effects of COVID-19 for yourself and your patients by following these important safety tips. Staying healthy will allow you to do your job better and help more people in the process.