Tuberculosis (abbreviated as TB for tubercle bacillus or Tuberculosis) is a common and often deadly infectious disease caused by mycobacteria, mainly Mycobacterium tuberculosis [1]. Tuberculosis usually attacks the lungs (as pulmonary TB) but can also affect the central nervous system, the lymphatic system, the circulatory system, the genitourinary system, the gastrointestinal system, bones, joints, and even the skin.
Published in Chapter:
Hotline for Exposure to Occupational Hazards
Ken Bleakley (CEO, FONEMED, USA)
Copyright: © 2010
|Pages: 22
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-61520-670-4.ch038
Abstract
Health care providers, first responders and law enforcement professionals face serious safety issues when they find themselves exposed to health-threatening incidents on the job. Rapid, reliable and documented guidance by specially-trained medical personnel is essential to the safety of the exposed person and their contacts. Florida Hospital Centra Care and FONEMED, an accredited medical call center, offer a 24X7 hotline to provide counseling to employees who sustain an occupational exposure. Paper - based systems proved inadequate to handle sophisticated protocols using the compliance guidelines of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services and Centers for Disease Control. Therefore, they developed advanced information technology for registered nurses to process the protocols, obtain source information, fully document all calls and transmit the reports immediately to the treating health care provider and other concerned parties. Nurses also have immediate access to advice from on-call occupational medicine physicians for unusual environmental exposures, pandemics such as H1N1 Flu, or bioterrorism issues. The Exposure Hotline has since become the backbone of a Swine Flu Hotline now serving the general public