How childcare centres are preventing the spread of illnesses

On this episode of the Adeona podcast, Tracy and Zoe discuss all things relating to common day-care illnesses. Learn more about Adeona’s sick children policies and procedures for handling illnesses and exposure at our centres, as well as how you can help prevent the spread of illness in your child care centre.

This episode covers:

• Exclusion periods, policies and procedures for common childcare illnesses
• How a childcare’s sick policies, procedures and guidelines are developed
• The average illness amount for children in care and how long it takes to build up that immunity
• The policies and procedures in place to prevent the spread of germs and illness in an early childhood education centre
• Why child care services give a time limit for sick child pickup
• What parents and caregivers can do to help prevent the spread of illness in childcare centres

How Our Childcare Health Policies are Determined

Our policies regarding illness, exclusion periods and how we manage certain illnesses within the service is dictated by the Staying Healthy document, which is produced and updated annually by the NHMRC (National Health and Medical Research Council). Likewise, we work closely with our Public Health Units who are managed by Queensland Health.

How We Manage & Prevent Illness

We follow a range of policies and procedures at Adeona to help prevent the spread of germs and illness, which are all informed by government sources and Queensland Health.

This includes the frequent cleaning and sanitizing of carpets, rugs, door handles, surfaces, and high-touch places. Likewise, if children are seen with a toy in their mouth, immediately after that child is finished with that toy it gets picked up and put in a bucket to be sanitised.

Additionally, if an early childhood education centre has more than 3 cases of gastro, that must be reported to the public health unit. The public health unit then performs an investigation, which includes working with the service to track which rooms the illnesses are in to ensure correct hygiene procedures. The public health units then advise the centre to help work through those processes, which often results in the service being advised to increase exclusion periods from 24 to 48 hours to ensure no one is returning while still contagious.

Helpful Links

• Infection Control in Childcare Settings
• Staying Healthy 5th Edition: Preventing infectious diseases in early childhood education and care services
• Public Health Units
   

Thank You
We’d love to hear from you! If you have any feedback, suggestions or questions about anything we discussed in this episode, please feel free to reach out – tracy@adeona.com.au.

Our Early Childhood Education Centres

Coorparoo | Mitchelton | Noosaville | Mackay