Pittsburgh VA to screen everyone entering its facilities for COVID-19
By the end of this week, the Veterans Affairs Pittsburgh Healthcare System hopes to begin screening for COVID-19 every person — patient or visitor — who tries to enter one of its facilities at its campuses in Oakland and Aspinwall.
“The goal is to try to limit the number of people who enter this campus who are at high risk of being COVID-19 positive,” Pittsburgh VA Director Don Koenig said Tuesday at the VA Town Hall meeting held at the hospital on University Drive in Oakland. “It’s just good common sense.”
The Pittsburgh VA appears to be the first health care facility in the Pittsburgh area to enforce such a drastic screening protocol for everyone who tries to enter a facility.
This follows a directive from the VA headquarters in Washington, D.C., last week that all VA health care facilities begin screening everyone who enters. Some hospitals in affected areas like Palo Alto, Calif., and Seattle began screening everyone last week.
The Pittsburgh VA began what amounted to a pilot program at its long-term care facility with 169 residents at its Aspinwall campus on Friday, reducing the available entrances down to one and screening everyone who entered.
Screening involves asking people if they have any of the telltale signs of COVID-19 infection — fever, cough, shortness of breath — and if the person has visited an affected area or been in contact with someone with a confirmed case of the disease.
UPMC and Excela Health said they have not yet contemplated screening visitors at all of their facilities.
Excela Health Chief Medical Officer Dr. Carol Fox said in an email that the Westmoreland County-based health care system has “not made that determination [whether to screen everyone who enters one of its buildings] but the situation is evolving based on direction from” the state Department of Health and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
UPMC spokeswoman Allison Hydzik said in an email that “At this time, UPMC is not screening non-patient visitors who come into our facilities. We have signs asking visitors who are ill or have cold symptoms not to visit. When any region we serve has evidence of community spread of COVID-19, we will begin actively screening all visitors to our skilled nursing facilities in that region for symptoms of the disease.”
The VA’s Aspinwall campus has other services besides longterm care, but has far fewer visitors and patients than the VA hospital in Oakland, which is an acute care hospital that serves patients for a five-state region from hundreds of miles away.
Even so, there were long lines when the Pittsburgh VA began screening visitors at the Aspinwall facility at 5 p.m. on Friday, and Mr. Koenig said his staff knows the experience is going to