Employees working within the Healthcare industry may be exposed to, and transmit, vaccine-preventable diseases such as Hepatitis B, influenza, measles, mumps, Varicella (chicken pox) and Pertussis (whooping cough). If staff are not already immune to certain infections, they can be potential sources of infection to patients and other staff. Maintaining immunity in the health care worker population helps prevent the transmission of vaccine-preventable diseases to and from health care workers, patients and visitors to Western Health.

All Western Health employees should know their immunisation history or have evidence of immunity to vaccine preventable diseases. Be regularly tested for TB disease if they work in a high TB exposure risk area, and have received a course of Hepatitis B immunisation, with post-immunisation testing.  

Additional Health Clearance
All Western Health healthcare workers, including students, who perform exposure prone procedures (EPPs), require additional health clearance. Additional health clearance means being non-infectious for:
• HIV (antibody negative),
• hepatitis B (surface antigen negative or, if positive, e-antigen negative with a viral load of 103 genome equivalents/ml    or less); and
• hepatitis C (antibody negative or, if positive, negative for hepatitis C RNA).
Exposure prone procedures are invasive procedures where there is potential for direct contact between the skin, usually  finger or thumb of the healthcare worker, and sharp surgical instruments, needles, or sharp tissues (e.g. fractured bones), spicules of bone or teeth in body cavities or in poorly visualised or confined body sites, including the mouth of the patient.