The most effective ways of minimising exposure to and transmission of infections in the workplace include the following:
- Encourage employees with symptoms of infection (e.g. coughing, sneezing, diarrhoea, vomiting, rashes) to refrain from coming into the workplace, even if they feel able to carry on working. The organisation should make it clear to staff that they should either work from home or take time off sick to limit potential spread to others.
- The organisation should have a clear policy outlining the length of exclusion from work required to prevent transmission of infections and/or linking to relevant guidance, e.g. staff with diarrhoea and/or vomiting should not come back to work until they are symptom free for at least 48 hours.
Discover information on recommended exclusion periods here.
- Ensure staff stay away from work until they no longer have symptoms.
- As a general principle, if possible, enable some or all staff to work from home some of the time, particularly during high prevalence periods such as autumn/winter.
- Where employees with symptoms feel able to continue to work, alternative working arrangements such as home working should be advised. It is important that they remain away from the workplace or meetings with others until they no longer have symptoms.
- Proactively encourage eligible staff to have their annual flu vaccine and COVID-19 where relevant (see question 5).
- Maintain a safe environment as outlined in question 1 above (cleaning regime, encourage good hand hygiene, improve ventilation).
- Keep accurate records of staff and visitors with suspected or diagnosed infections so you are able to comply with any requests from the Public Health Wales and/or the local authority to support contact tracing in relation to notifiable diseases. Minimum data should include date of onset of symptoms, type of symptoms and, if possible, number and names of individuals exposed to the infection.
- If collecting information for contact tracing businesses must comply with data protection requirements outlined in guidance by the Information Commissioner’s Office.
- You should support the wishes of employees and visitors/customers to your workplace who may wish to wear face coverings.
- For health and social care settings, provide appropriate PPE for staff for the type of infection/symptoms and train them to correctly wear the PPE safely.