Implementing Physical Distancing in the Hospital: A Key Strategy to Prevent Nosocomial Transmission of COVID‐19

Abstract

Hospitalists serve as frontline healthcare professionals caring for the increasing number of COVID-19 patients in the United States. The safety of hospitalists and other frontline healthcare workers is paramount to preventing high nosocomial transmission as has been reported in several other countries. Much effort to date has rightly focused on ensuring healthcare workers have appropriate personal protective equipment (PPE) given the known increased risk of nosocomial infection to healthcare workers. However, another important strategy to prevent nosocomial transmission is to implement "social distancing," or avoiding close contact with others. While this approach has received considerable press with regards to implementation in communities, social, or physical, distancing in the hospital is also a critical way to prevent nosocomial transmission and ensure the health and welfare of our workforce to meet the challenge. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) defines close contact as less than 6 feet away for over 10 minutes. 1 Given the myriad clinical interactions that occur within teams in the hospital, such distancing can prove challenging.At the University of Chicago Medicine in Illinois, our hospitalist group was an early adopter of implementing several strategies to facilitate physical distancing in the context of clinical care to minimize community transmission of COVID-19 among healthcare professionals. We describe how to implement physical distancing effectively in specific hospital settings, including some challenges and strategies to surmount them. ROUNDING, SIGN-OUT, AND MULTIDISCIPLINARY ROUNDS RoundingPerhaps one of the most fundamental hardships with physical distancing is how to conduct routine clinical care such as

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Development of a Mobile-App Based Free Field Click Test Against Conventional Free Field Voice Test: A Randomized Controlled Trial

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“…Limiting workplace and nosocomial exposure to COVID-19 required a coordinated institutional response [25]. For example, in order to identify potentially infected people quickly and contain the risk of transmission, strategies for screening all staff prior to entering the hospital were implemented at each hospital.…”

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