Digital systems
Digital health monitoring: the benefits for care homes
Steve Hathaway, CEO of Dijital Technologies and insights director at FeverCheckerPro, explains how ensuring duty of care compliance via the use of digital COVID-19 protection measures can have real cost and productivity benefits for care homes
Delivering effective COVID-19 prevention measures in care homes is not easy. Despite the relaxation of the COVID-19 measures last year, it remains incumbent upon care homes to be vigilant and carry out COVID surveillance – two factors incorporated in the government’s Living with COVID-19 policy. At first sight, this might seem confusing, but ‘vigilance’ and ‘surveillance’ are at the heart of the legal requirements for duty of care under the prevailing Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 s 2. The employer’s obligation under this Act is a duty of care to take measures to protect and avert unnecessary health risks to staff and residents. The legislation is clear and directs
the employer, in this case a care home, to its responsibility in making suitable and sufficient risk assessments of any health and safety hazards to which their employees could be exposed while they are at work (Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 reg 3). The only reliable method for establishing whether staff, resident, or visitor health is being compromised by a hazard is by monitoring and assessing the employees exposed to such hazards through adequate and appropriate health surveillance programmes. In the fluid circumstances of the pandemic, where things can change week upon week, there is a clear need for monitoring that keeps abreast of the latest infections and developments. This has been true throughout the pandemic; the law has not changed, and in essence the government provided a reminder of this in its Living with COVID-19 guidance on 22 February 2022.
Recent research revealed that more than 98 per cent of employers are yet to adopt sufficient measures in compliance with the duty of care regulations under the 1974 Act s 2. It is essential that employers are diligent with COVID-19 hazard monitoring and surveillance at work in order to protect staff health and ensure that they are not exposed to infection and contagion from this debilitating and sometimes fatal virus. Indeed, such diligence is required under this employment legislation.
Retrospective tests
Many care homes are taking COVID-19 health ‘measures’ such a lateral flow and
Frequent, regular temperature monitoring and tracking reveals the onset of a fever, and alerts to the need to seek medical intervention
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PCR tests; however, these are retrospective tests that reveal if a person already has the coronavirus and is, by implication, infectious. Therefore, these measures have very little benefit as control mechanisms to prevent contamination to others, as a person is most likely to have been infectious for five days at the time the test indicted positive. LFT and PCR tests are therefore not an effective method of the entry ‘control’ that will prevent the virus from entering and spreading to others that is so essential before staff enter the care homes each day. The volume of infection in the wider population worldwide after over 30 months is evidence of how ineffective LFT and PCR testing is at prevention. However, with continuous monitoring it is possible to identify a potential viral infection at its initial phase of the infection cycle. These continue to be challenging times for care homes as the love, care, compassion,
www.thecarehomeenvironment.com March 2023
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