Health-Care Recommendations for Animals in Hospitals

By Sondra Forsyth

With more and more animals visiting health-care facilities, experts have issued new guidelines for minimizing the possible spread of any bacteria.

The recommendations, by the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA), include suggestions for policies involving animals including animal-assisted activities, service animals, research animals and personal pet visitation in acute care hospitals.

The guidance was published in Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology, the journal of SHEA.

“Animals have had an increasing presence in healthcare facilities,” said David Weber, MD, MPH, a lead author of the recommendations. “While there may be benefits to patient care, the role of animals in the spread of bacteria is not well understood. We have developed standard infection prevention and control guidance to help protect patients and healthcare providers via animal-to-human transmission in healthcare settings.”

The guidelines are grouped by the role of animals – animal-assisted activities (pet therapy and volunteer programs), service animals, research animals and personal pet visitation. According to a news release from SHEA, these are some of the recommendations:

Animal-Assisted Activities

Facilities should develop a written policy for animal-assisted activities. An animal-assisted activity visit liaison should be designated.

Allow only dogs to serve in animal-assisted activities, such as pet therapy.

Animals and handlers should be formally trained and evaluated.

Animal interaction areas should be determined in collaboration with the Infection Prevention and Control team and clinical staff should be educated about the program.

Animal handlers must have all required immunizations, restrict contact of their animal to patient(s) visited and prevent the animal from having contact with invasive devices, and require that everyone who touches the animal to practice hand hygiene before and after contact.

The hospital should maintain a log of all animal-assisted activities visits including rooms and persons visited for potential contact tracing.

Service Animals

The policy allowing service animals of patients and visitors into the facility should be compliant with the Federal Americans for Disability Act (ADA), other applicable state and local regulations and include a statement that only dogs and miniature horses are recognized as Service Animals under federal law.

If an inpatient has a service animal, notification should be made to the Infection Prevention and Control Team, followed by discussion with the patient to make sure the owner of the service animal complies with institutional policies.

Healthcare providers or staff may ask the patient or visitor to describe what work/tasks the dog performs for the patient, but may not ask for a “certification” or “papers.”

Personal Pet Visitation

Pets should, in general, be prohibited from entering the healthcare facility.

Exceptions can be considered if the healthcare team determines that visitation with a pet would be of benefit to the patient and can be performed with limited risk. Even then, visitation should be restricted to dogs.

The patient must perform hand hygiene immediately before and after contact with the animal.

The authors note that as the role of animals in healthcare evolves, there is a need for stronger research to establish evidence-based guidelines to manage the risk to patients and healthcare providers.