Why following best practices for hospital visitor management will help keep your patients safe and secure.
When it comes to keeping your patients safe, it’s best not to take any chances. This extends to the ways in which you manage visitor, staff and contractor sign-in. Being able to keep track of everyone coming in and out of your premises is becoming more and vital to keeping everyone on site safe and secure.
It’s difficult to know, though, exactly what the best practices for hospital visitor management are and how to implement a system that meets the needs of your visitors, contractors and staff.
So, we’ve put together this quick guide on the best practices for hospital visitor management, so you can be sure your visitor management implementation fulfils all of your requirements.
Integrate with access control
If, for example, staff members can currently sign into certain areas of the hospital using key fobs/cards, you can marry this up with your visitor management system. This allows staff to carry s single ID card that, enabling them to check in to a specific area of the hospital and gain access to that area with one quick scan of their card.
Not only does access control technology make staff-only areas of your premises more secure, it also allows staff member to save time and get back to Loren pressing tasks such as patient care.
Pick the ideal location
Implementing a visitor management system is a great step in making your hospital safer and more secure, but it’s vital that the system is installed in the correct location. There are a number of factors that determine this:
- Visitor footfall: where do you tend to have the biggest influx of visitors? If one particular entrance of your hospital has significantly more visitors than others, it may be worth considering investing in more than one visitor management system.
- Visibility: it’s vital that you position your visitor management system in a location that makes it clearly visible to people arriving on site.
- Convenience: furthermore, it’s important that your visitor management is located somewhere that is convenient for visitors. If someone feels like they have to go out of their way to use the system, it’s likely that they simply won’t bother signing in at all.
Employee training
Unless an entrance is unmanned, it’s importantly that.ataff members are properly trained on the functionality of a visitor management system. This allows them to quickly and accurately field any questionable or concerns from people signing in, which can help put them at ease about the whole process.
It’s also important that the sign-in process is communicated effectively to staff members who will be using the system every day. This is vital to avoiding frustrating and wasting the time of staff members.
Communicate policies to visitors
Ensuring that best practices for hospital visitor management are met also means meeting best practices for communicating policies to incoming visitors.
Typically, visitor management systems include functionality to display policies to new visitors the first time they sign in to the premises. These policies can include: health and safety, site access and document/certification requirements.
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This is by no means an exhaustive list of all the steps you should take in order to follow the best practices for hospital visitor management. If you’re looking for advice on the best way to implement visitor management processes in your hospital, we’d love to hear from you.
If you want to make your patients, staff and premises more secure with a visitor management system, VisiPoint is the ideal solution. Get in touch with a member of our expert team today on +44 (0) 191 341 0016 or using the form below for a free, no-pressure consultation.
