Monitoring approaches for health-care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic

Monitoring approaches for health-care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic
The Lancet Infectious Diseases July 23, 2020DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(20)30458-8

• Health-care workers are crucial to any health-care system. During the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, health-care workers are at a substantially increased risk of becoming infected with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and could come to considerable harm as a result. Depending on the phase of the pandemic, patients with COVID-19 might not be the main source of SARS-CoV-2 infection and health-care workers could be exposed to atypical patients, infected family members, contacts, and colleagues, or live in communities of active transmission. 
• Clear strategies to support and appropriately manage exposed and infected health-care workers are essential to ensure effective staff management and to engender trust in the workplace. These management strategies should focus on risk stratification, suitable clinical monitoring, low-threshold access to diagnostics, and decision making about removal from and return to work. Policy makers need to support health-care facilities in interpreting guidance during a pandemic that will probably be characterised by fluctuating local incidence of SARS-CoV-2 to mitigate the impact of this pandemic on their workforce.