Tampa, Florida, sends nurses to inspect major construction sites

In an effort to ensure contractors are using best practices to prevent the spread of coronavirus, Tampa, Florida, is sending nurse-inspectors to the 52 largest construction sites in the city to do spot checks.

According to the Tampa Bay Times, this tactic appears to be unique among the largest local governments in the Tampa Bay area. In Pinellas County, for example, sheriff’s deputies follow up on tips about construction sites that do not follow the county’s health and safety guidelines.

Since the U.S. Department of Homeland Security designated construction and infrastructure projects as essential businesses during the pandemic, on any given day those 52 construction sites collectively have 10,000 to 12,000 workers on the job.

“That’s a great thing, because that’s an enormous engine that’s still running, but also that’s an enormous amount of people that we really need to be mindful of relative to the spread of this disease,” says Carole Post, Tampa’s administrator for development and economic opportunity. “We wanted to give clear guidance to large construction sites in ways that could help their workers and those they might interact with after their work was over.”

This guidance includes limiting visitors and screening everyone coming onto a job site, providing plenty of portable hand-washing facilities around the project, keeping workers more than six feet apart where possible, limiting the number of people inside constriction trailers, not allowing food trucks onto job sites and posting signs about safe distancing on the job.

“Some of these we got from some of our large contractors who were already doing this or beginning to do it,” Post says. For example, New York City-based Skanska, which is providing construction services on a $42 million innovation center at the University of South Florida, has projects in Asia, she said, “so they were months ahead of us in trying to tackle these things.”

The city has contracted with Dr. James McCluskey, a Tampa occupational medicine physician who works as a medical director advising large organizations, and about 20 nurses, most from the faculty at Rasmussen College–Tampa/Brandon, to visit each of the 52 sites two to three times a week.

The city and the college do not have a formal agreement. Rather, nursing faculty are doing the inspection work on their own time, a Rasmussen spokeswoman said.

Inspections began April 10 and generally found that construction sites were taking the precautions seriously, officials said. If the nurse-inspectors do find a problem, they bring it up with each job site’s designated COVID-19 compliance coordinator and note it in a site report sent to McCluskey.

“It was really great to see that many of the sites actually took the initiative to do pre-screening to ensure that their employees are safe,” says Maura Stafford, the associate dean of nursing at Rasmussen College–Tampa/Brandon. “Others, of course, we are working with them.”

“We’re not trying to catch you or ‘gotcha’ and issue a fine,” Post says. “It’s really about trying to reinforce good behavior."