Tampa Sends Nurses to Inspect Work Sites

May 1, 2020

Tampa’s City Hall is sending nurse-inspectors to the 52 largest construction sites in town to help keep workers healthy and employed. 

The use of nurses to do spot checks appears to be unique among the Tampa Bay area. 

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has 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 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,” Carole Post, the city’s administrator for development and economic opportunity, told Tampa Bay News. “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.” 

The city is working with Dr. James McCluskey, a Tampa occupational medicine physician, and about 20 nurses to visit each site two to three times a week.

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

Source: Tampa Bay Times/Construction & Demolition