How HR Can Best Protect Health Care Workers From COVID-19: Rapid Antigen Testing

Written by: Dr. Jeff Andrews

COVID-19 pushed health care workers to their physical and mental limits. In October 2021, The World Health Organization issued a statement urging countries to prioritize the protection of health care workers as they battle ongoing anxiety, stress, depression and illness on the front lines of the pandemic, a crisis compounding a preexisting shortage of health care workers.

While it is in the best interest of all businesses to maintain workplace testing, it is especially important for hospitals, intensive care units, clinics and nursing homes to protect their health care workers who are exposed to COVID-19 patients every day. To protect workers, the WHO formally encouraged governments to increase efforts to collect COVID-19 data on worker infections.

Regular COVID-19 testing is mandated in some medical settings, however not all rapid antigen tests offer the function of automated results reporting. Using COVID-19 rapid antigen testing with a reporting function provides HR executives working in the medical field with the opportunity to efficiently and continuously safeguard both employees and their patients.

The BD Veritor System for Rapid Detection of SARS‑CoV‑2 can detect the virus in an individual in as little as 15 minutes, providing rapid, reliable results. With one-button functionality and convenient portability (the analyzer is roughly the size of a cellphone), health care professionals can confidently use the system. Importantly, reporting options are available.

The BD Veritor Informatics Solution and submit to state and local public health departments within 24 hours. This enables the real-time tracking and protection of health care workers’ health and helps reduce the burden of manual reporting.

Additionally, BD Veritor At-Home COVID-19 Test enables workers to test from home while ensuring verifiable results as the test results can only be read using a smartphone. A definitive ‘POSITIVE’ or ‘NEGATIVE’ is time-stamped on a digital display in the app and reporting the results to an employer can also be fully automated, if selected by the employee. The addition of testing management platforms like ReturnSafe simplifies and streamlines the management of testing results and workplace health and safety solutions.

Protecting health care workers who risk their lives to protect patients from contracting COVID-19 is vital.  At a greater scale, health care workers are also the greatest resource for patients to overcome the virus. Testing and reporting is critical when it comes to offering health care workers safety at work. 

Dr. Jeff Andrews is the Medical Affairs Vice President at BD Integrated Diagnostics Solutions. BD manufactures and sells a wide variety of products for the safe collection and transportation of diagnostic specimens, as well as instruments and reagent systems to accurately detect a broad range of infectious diseases, infections, and cancers—including COVID-19. To learn how BD is supporting clinicians amid the COVID-19 pandemic, visit bdveritor.com.

These products have not been FDA cleared or approved; the BD Veritor System for Rapid Detection of SARS-CoV-2 has been authorized by FDA under EUA for use by authorized laboratories.

These products have been authorized only for the detection of proteins from SARS-CoV-2, not for any other viruses or pathogens; and, the emergency use of these products is only authorized for the duration of the declaration that circumstances exist justifying the authorization of emergency use of in vitro diagnostics for detection and/or diagnosis of COVID-19 under Section 564(b)(1) of the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, 21 U.S.C. § 360bbb-3(b)(1), unless the declaration is terminated or authorization is revoked sooner.

The post How HR Can Best Protect Health Care Workers From COVID-19: Rapid Antigen Testing appeared first on HR Executive.