Visitors to Riverside Tappahannock Hospital will notice a new check in process in place. All visitors ages 13 and older will now be asked to provide a photo ID upon checking in to the front desk which will be scanned into the system to create a badge. All visitors will be required to wear a badge while inside the facility. For visitors younger than 13 years, they must be accompanied by a badged visitor at all times.
“This is part of an ongoing effort by hospitals across the country to better monitor and manage the various people that are in our facilities,” said Liz Martin, President of Riverside Tappahannock Hospital. “Our patients wear identification armbands, team members wear Riverside ID badges, vendors and contractors wear special temporary badges, and now all visitors will be identified with personalized badges as well.”
Martin goes on to explain that this new process allows hospital staff to verify who is entering the building and the purpose of their visit.
“It also allows us to track who has left the building so in the case of an emergency, we can account for who may still be inside,” Martin adds.
Safety has long been a priority for Riverside Health. The new badging system follows several other initiatives designed to keep patients safe, including new signage and team member training about consistent behaviors such as patient identification and hand hygiene that patients can expect every time their care is being delivered.
“Our number-one priority is to keep people safe,” said Martin. “We have several programs in place, and it can seem redundant or concerning to patients when we ask their name and date of birth several times over the course of a hospital stay. But we want patients and visitors to understand why we are doing this and how these behaviors are for their benefit.”
The team at Riverside Tappahannock Hospital was recently nationally recognized with an ‘A’ Hospital Safety Grade from Leapfrog. Leapfrog is an independent national watchdog organization committed to improving health care quality and safety for consumers and purchasers. Their assessment includes 28 measures of publicly available hospital safety data to assign grades to more than 2,600 U.S. acute-care hospitals twice each year.
Martin further explains that the collective efforts put in place to keep patients, visitors and staff safe helps Riverside Tappahannock Hospital deliver on its mission.
“Our goal has always been to care for others as we would care for those we love,” Martin says.
Riverside Tappahannock Hospital is the first Riverside hospital to implement electronic visitor badging. There are plans to implement visitor badging at all Riverside hospitals by fourth quarter of 2020.