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Many companies are unprepared for fluNov 22, 2009 (Fort Worth Star-Telegram - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- U.S. employers are bracing for more flu cases this winter. Whether they're prepared is another question. Many -- particularly small and medium-size companies -- don't have business continuity plans in place for dealing with significant flu-related absences, surveys indicate. Deepening the problem in many workplaces are rules that don't bend for allowing employees time off to heal or deal with a sick child. Sandra Parker, Tarrant County Public Health's medical director and health authority, said small employers' plans should start with "each individual employee's preparedness," beginning with the owner's. "Thinking about individual preparedness is a significant contributor to business preparedness," she said. If your child becomes ill, "do you have a plan?" she said. "You don't need to be sending them to school or a day care." Plans should also address how employees can work from home or shift duties to others, she said. Many employers require notice before employees can take time off, even for sickness, she noted. Given that no one plans to get the flu, that would seem to call for some flexibility. "Is there room in the HR policy for leniency?" she said. Though employers might not have written policies for dealing with significant worker absences, they've likely at least thought it through, but "they just haven't written it down," Parker said. At Karsten Financial, a 10-employee financial services firm based in Fort Worth, Tom Karsten, managing partner, put together a business continuity plan after 9-11. It includes backup servers, methods for contacting clients, and phones and computers to allow employees to work from home. The sick leave policy also doesn't penalize employees who go home sick or have to deal with a sick child, Karsten said. All of that helped recently when three employees were out sick. And Karsten's child and the child of another employee had confirmed H1N1 cases. "We haven't had any difficulty getting things done in a timely manner and meeting deadlines," Karsten said. And if something similar hit at the height of tax season? Employees still on the job would work more, Karsten said. "It becomes a part of our philosophy that we have an obligation to our clients," Karsten said. "Everybody else needs to pitch in." At Healthpoint, a 300-employee Fort Worth company that specializes in wound care products, senior staff members met in the spring during the outbreak of swine flu. "We asked ourselves as a company, what should we do to respond to this?" Chief Medical Officer Herbert Slade said. The company ended up buying laptops for key employees who didn't already have them "so they could work from home if they were symptomatic," Slade said. The company also put bottles of Ultracept hand sanitizer, which it sells in hospitals, in conference rooms, break rooms and restrooms, Slade said. That led to a business idea: Seeing Ultracept in the break rooms, the new CEO wondered why the company didn't market it to consumers, Slade said. Healthpoint recently rolled out Ultracept to that market. Larger organizations are more likely to have developed policies and contingencies for dealing with high numbers of employee sickness, surveys suggest. Fort Worth is having all departments review and update their continuity plans by the end of January, said Keith Wells, senior emergency management officer. Some key questions: How well can departments operate on reduced staff? Can they loan employees to other departments? How quickly can they train loaned employees or temporary staffers? What kind of work can be done from home? "What do we absolutely have to do to keep functioning?" Wells said. "The whole trick to this is thinking it through ahead of time rather than having to do it under stress." The city has distributed bottles of hand sanitizer throughout its offices and put up "6 Ways to Fight the Flu" posters offered by Tarrant County Public Health. There are also plans to bring in software in the spring that will make it easier to track employee absences. At recent annual free flu-shot clinics for city workers, 3,385, or 43 percent of the municipal work force, participated at a cost to the city of $20 per employee, Wells said. Last year, 2,672 employees -- 35 percent of the work force -- got shots. The city also plans to offer H1N1 shots to employees when enough vaccine arrives, Wells said. Above all, Wells said, "we encourage healthy habits. If you're sick, go home, especially if you have a fever." Numbers of employee absences are "a little higher" right now than is typical, but tracking the specifics isn't easy because of federal privacy rules, Wells said. "It seems like people are being really cautious," he said. "If somebody gets sick, they may be a little more likely to stay home." Fort Worth school district officials have put hand sanitizers into schools, distributed lists of available cleaning supplies to principals and bought machines that fog school buses with anti-bacterials, said Cecelia Speer, chief of district operations. "We're taking a lot more time to wipe down surfaces," Speer said. The district also installed software at the end of September that makes it much easier to isolate children's absences at individual schools based on data that the schools report daily, Speer said. The job of the school employee who reports the data hasn't changed, but the system for collecting it has, she said. The six-color alert system goes from green (least serious) to black (most serious). On one recent day, the district counted 120 schools in green, 12 blue, three yellow, two orange, one red and none black. Even when schools know they're tracking a high level of student illnesses, "we don't know why they're sick," Speer said. "It's not an exact science." Student absences spiked at the end of September and tapered off in mid-October, but teacher absences didn't show the same pattern, Speer said. Still, she considers this just "the first wave." "We still remind [the teachers and staff] that the regular season is coming," she said. ------ Who's most susceptible? Very high exposure risk: Healthcare employees who perform invasive procedures such as those involving the lungs, specimen collection and some dental work or who work on known or suspected pandemic patients. High exposure risk: Doctors, nurses, other hospital staff, emergency medical technicians and people who perform autopsies on known or suspected pandemic patients. Medium exposure risk: Employees who have a lot of contact with the general population, such as school personnel, "high-population density work environments" and some high-volume retail stores. Lower exposure risk: Employees, such as office workers, who have minimal occupational contact with the general public and co-workers. Source: OSHA ------ Do hand sanitizers work? "They're a good adjunct to regular hand washing," said Allison Aiello, assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. "Soap and water is a very, very effective method at reducing influenza." Alcohol-based sanitizers, used moderately by those who don't have skin allergies, haven't harmed the skin in tests, Aiello said. Overuse of alcohol-based sanitizers, however, can lead to dry hands and cracked skin, making the user susceptible to picking up germs, she said. Also, such sanitizers are flammable. Resources Centers for Disease Control: www.cdc.gov Tarrant County Public Health: www.tarrantcounty.com/ehealth OSHA: www.osha.gov Fort Worth school district: www.fwisd.gov/flu -- Scott Nishimura ------ Fort Worth schools' hands-on experiment Microbiology students from Joann Yannazzo's class at North Side High School in Fort Worth are running an experiment on the benefits of hand-washing to kill germs. On Nov. 13, North Side students visited Helbing Elementary School and took swab samples on the playground from some of the children's hands. They also took samples from students who washed their hands first. The results will be part of a video, shot and produced by the school district's EdTV, that's scheduled to go on the district's Web site, www.fwisd.gov, before Thanksgiving. "Our hypothesis is that the simple act of washing your hands can significantly decrease the spread of germs and bacteria," Yannazzo said. -- Scott Nishimura Scott Nishimura, 817-390-7808 To see more of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.dfw.com. Copyright (c) 2009, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Texas Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email [email protected], call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA. |