The Water Drop™: Season 2, Episode 10

Best Practices When Dealing With a Case Investigation

Many times when, you know, organizations get notified from the Department of Health, you don’t start your day expecting to get this notification and you are sitting there, dealing with whatever you gotta deal with during your day, all of the sudden an email comes across or you get a letter in the mail stating you know, somebody that was in your building has tested positive for Legionnaires’ Disease and we need you to do x, y and z. That x, y and z varies pretty significantly but there are some best practices that we are recommending for our customers and that we see pretty consistently. The first thing we tell our customers to do is take a deep breath, and you know, relax because it can be a very stressful time all of the sudden you see that, your heart sinks, you’re like: “oh my gosh am I in trouble?” You are not in trouble at that point, so just take that into consideration. A second thing is to assemble your incident response team, usually somebody on the infection prevention, somebody on the risk management side, a building administrator, or property manager, and maintenance you know, it’s a collection of individuals. So, get that team together, gather the facts, Legionella test results, Water Management Plan execution, a lot of the facts around the case. The next thing that you need to do is reach out to a Legionella consultant that specializes in these case investigation responses. So that is a really critical factor because a lot of people will say, “yeah we do Legionella, we can handle it, yeah we can do a water management plan.” But it is really important to work with a company that has expertise in this area because it’s navigating a complex situation. Organize yourself, have a spokesperson and you know just listen, and stay neutral, don’t get emotional in the situation even though it is tough to do.

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