COVID - 1 9
Creating a COVID safety toolkit for clinical services
Marta Kalas explains how the use of a tool kit, combined with training, can help keep track of changes to regulations and key actions, while caring for patients during the pandemic.
Although we have positive news about vaccines, we also know that COVID-19 is here to stay for some time yet. This means we need to create processes and systems to enable us to manage in our health setting safely and without being overburdened. One way to do that is to create a COVID
Safety Toolkit. This is a package of tools that will help you keep track of the changes and the ever-increasing regulation and actions you need to stay on top of. For example, Thomson Screening has developed a toolkit to
help managers work through what is needed and how to action it. It provides a checklist, training and sample documentation. Although creating a toolkit may sound overwhelming, the good news is none of these activities is new. What is different now is that each action needs a specific COVID version.
What should a Toolkit contain? The approach is simple: rather than creating individual processes and lots of standalone documents, you bring together in one place
every item you will need to respond to COVID. A toolkit should contain: 1 Governance framework. 2 Risk management including individual and group risk assessments.
3 Action plans. 4 Communications plans. 5 Review and update plan.
Governance: You need to decide who is in charge: who has oversight of all your COVID related activities; where does the buck stop? Several months into COVID, this will have already been undertaken, but it needs to be put into your COVID Policy and everyone needs to know who it is.
Risk management: This includes all the changes, adaptations and new ways of working you put in place in response to COVID. If these are risk assessment based and clearly documented (a simple excel sheet will do; the key is clarity, not length), you can quickly check what needs updating if there is a local or national change in guidelines. Most of your arrangements can probably stay as they are, but do you know which ones need to change and how? If your original assessment is at hand, in an easy-to-access document, you can revise it very quickly. You may need to assess an individual
person’s risks as well. For example, somebody who has recently had COVID will need different kinds of support than someone who has never had it, or someone who lives with an elderly relative. Our general understanding of risks relating to specific groups (i.e. young people, healthcare workers, etc.) is much better than earlier in the year and is constantly improving. You may want to fine-tune your risk groups at regular intervals. Again, this is where having a central document will save time.
Action plans: This needs little explanation; it goes hand-in-hand with your risk assessment changes. If there has been no change then no action is needed. If there
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