Greater El Monte Community Hospital wishes to enter into a partnership/collaboration with our local communities to help educate and mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 virus within our communities.

Your health is our priority. We have the necessary precautions in place to protect our patients, physicians, employees, and visitors. We have a highly skilled team of Emergency Department Physicians, who have all been trained regarding prompt screening for this disease, including the formation of a COVID-19 Task Force.

Greater El Monte Community Hospital has incorporated CDC and WHO-recommended guidelines, along with Infection Prevention best practices to ensure successful mitigation efforts of this virus. Such measures include the following:

• Testing: We understand there are a lot of questions about testing. Currently we are only testing high-risk patients who undergo a screening process in our Emergency Department due to the limited availability of tests. Our healthcare system like those across the country is responding first to those who are most at risk – people who have serious chronic medical conditions. For healthy adults with mild symptoms we recommend staying home and avoid contact with others. However, we will provide access to testing once the tests become more readily available.

• Effective Tuesday, March 18, we have updated our visitor policy for the safety of our patients and staff. We will be allowing only one visitor per patient at any given time. No one under the age of 18 will be allowed to visit, unless the patient is deteriorating to an end-of-life situation. Anyone entering the hospital and/or Emergency Department will have their temperature monitored and will be asked a few screening questions including recent travels, etc. Those with a temperature of 100 F will not gain entry into the facility as a visitor or employee. These measures are very important in order to prevent the spread of COVID-19 among our vulnerable patient population.

• We highly encourage community members to follow CDC recommendation for the prevention of spreading COVID-19. This includes:

• Social distancing must be taken seriously! The symptoms of COVID-19 may take several days to appear. This means that someone can carry the virus even though they have no symptoms. Play-dates and having people over to your home, creates new possibilities for transmissions of the virus that school/work/event closures are trying hard to prevent. We understand this is hard, especially for children and teenagers but if we all do our part we can slow down the spread of this virus.

• Hand hygiene and disinfection of surfaces is also critical in your day-to-day life. Always perform hand hygiene by using soap& water for no less than 40 seconds, and/or using an alcohol-based hand sanitizer prior to touching your nose, mouth, or eyes.

Know that we are here for our community. Our incident command team continues to work around the clock, adjusting plans and policies to protect our staff and patients. For example, Greater El Monte Community Hospital has implemented our Emergency Contingency Plan, which consists of erecting a tent outside of the Emergency Department to assist in additional screening of patient’s should we encounter an influx of patients. We continue to work very closely with local, state and national partners, to ensure that we are best positioned to care for all patients.

We know this is a challenging time for everyone however, it is important that you take good care of yourself. Please know that we are all in this together. Thank you for your continued support of Greater El Monte Community Hospital during these trying times. You can rest be assured that we are doing everything we can to help stop the spread of this virus.

Greater El Monte Community Hospital is standing by to provide excellent compassionate care to our community. Thank you for allowing us to be your partner in health.