My recent hospital admission due to a COVID related disease, exposed me to some serious challenges that facilities and employers are dealing with regards to Covid-19. It also re-affirmed my observations for some time, and that is with the best effort – employers are really struggling with meeting the many requirements that they need to meet in dealing with COVID-19 impacts while still focusing on core business and being customer focused. As a patient in this facility, it became clear that doctors, nurses, and administrators are hard at work trying to obtain/maintain “compliance to rules and regulations” and focused on proving such through administrative measures – in the process, I felt that as a patient (and a customer) at that facility, their absence was very evident. I felt neglected, and often I had to play nursing assistant to an elder patient who I shared the room with.
Similarly, over the past 20 months, many industrial, manufacturing, retail and office facilities have implemented a variety of intensive measures to comply to Department of Labour COVID 19 Regulations requirements and ultimately protect their employees and workers.
These include, but not limited to:
- Provision of specialised PPE.
- Access control screening and recording.
- Cleaning and disinfecting regimens to keep their facilities and their staff healthy.
- Social distancing measures.
- Varying work schedules.
- Risk assessment reviews and reporting.
- Reporting to various Government departments -Department of Labor, Department of Health (NIOH).
- COVID testing and Vaccination etc.
My observations in various facilities is similar to my experience in hospital. That is a lot of these deliverables are done using untrained, incompetent resources, rendering these measures very ineffective e.g. security guards performing temperature screening resulting in incorrect readings, not being able to identify incorrect readings etc.
The HSEQ resources are bogged down with mountains of additional administrative process, many of which are not knowledgeable of such processes (such as tracing and reporting exposed individuals). The outcome of this process resulting in mass isolation of employees with a direct impact on business continuity.
Ineffective and costly cleaning and disinfecting of premises – due to poor product selection, duplicating cleaning activities, frequency not well defined, reacting to exposure reports etc.
As we move into 2022 and with the pandemic ebbing, some administrators are reconsidering these measures, wondering if they are still necessary.
I therefore encourage that you take some time and reflect on your organisational context, reflect on the measures that you have ventured into and consider amongst others, the following aspects:
- Are the measures effective? Are we seeing expected results?
- Can we trust the results we are seeing?
- Have we maintained focus on the customer in the process?
- Are we not duplicating some activities out of fear of being non compliant
- Is the cost of compliance reasonable in relation to the size of risk?
- Are the measures still relevant for the newer variants of COVID-19 and their forms of transmission?
- The unintended health impacts of some of the chemicals used in disinfectants and sanitizers.
- Making matters worse, we are now learning that many industrial facilities, offices, schools, health care centers, and others have been over disinfecting. So much so, it even has a name: indiscriminate disinfecting.
- “Disinfectants and sanitizers are essential preventive agents against the coronavirus disease,” according to a recent study published in Environmental Science and Pollution Research. “However, the pandemic crisis was marred by undue hype, which led to the indiscriminate use of disinfectants and sanitizers”. Are we using the right quality disinfectants and sanitizers? Are these resulting in other unintended health effects?
I believe it’s time to relook at these compliance measures and seek opportunity to improve and be more effective. To help you facilitate the process, note some suggestions below:
- Align cleaning and disinfection measures with existing cleaning contracts and processes.
- Use of existing measures such as UV lights for disinfection where possible. To help ensure safety, at least one manufacturer supplies remote controls so that these systems can be turned on and off before building tenants enter areas where the UV-C systems are being used.
- Building capacity within your HSEQ teams to deal with the exponential increase in administrative responsibilities associated with compliance
- Maximize existing measures such ventilation surveys which were anyway required for general occupational exposure. Invest in improving natural ventilation. By the way, this does not make teh building colder, as this creates other unintended health exposures.
- Align screening and tracing processes with existing occupational health surveillance measures. Focus on wellness measures that build immunity against various unknown” pandemic that we can expect in the future, especially with climate change effects being more prevalent.
- Engage the authorities on risk based approaches as opposed to generic one size fits all approaches.
- Automating some key processes, such temperature screening to ensure improved accuracy and consistency in measurements.
- Building robust systems that will be less people dependent to enable business continuity even when employees are forced to be off due to ill health or isolation.
“Pandemics like COVID-19 and the Spanish flu [of 1918] are relatively likely,” said William Pan, Ph.D., associate professor of global environmental health at Duke University.
“Understanding that pandemics aren’t so rare should raise the priority of efforts to prevent and control them in the future.”
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