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Methodist Village Senior Living starts health screening all visitors

Everyone who steps through the doors will have their temperature taken and if it’s 100.4 or higher they will be sent away.

FORT SMITH, Ark. — At Methodist Village Senior Living all staff, vendors and visitors are screened before they are allowed to leave the front desk.

It’s as simple as answering a few questions and having your temperature taken, but it could be life-saving for people who have underlying health conditions or compromised immune systems.

“These are our precious family members here, so we are willing to do anything to keep them safe. We also want to keep safe the staff because they are the ones caring for our precious family members 24 hours a day,” said Suzanne McPherson.

McPherson, who comes to Methodist Village to visit her father, got a text message Monday (March 9) telling her about the new screening procedures.

“Our primary job is to keep our residents and our employees safe and we really want to contain this virus if we can,” said Methodist Village CEO Melissa Curry.

Curry says everyone who steps through their doors will have their temperature taken and if it’s 100.4 or higher they will be sent away. People who have traveled outside the county recently or have flu-like symptoms also won’t be let in.

“We don’t want to use scare tactics, we don’t want people to be afraid but yesterday we had another meeting and we decided after we got the email from the Arkansas Department of Health that we needed to put these things in place,” Curry said.

Chief nursing officer Millie Meyers says the scariest part of the coronavirus to her is the 14-day incubation period with potentially no symptoms.

“For our residents and what we’ve been told the elderly population is the group that succumbing to this and it’s so dangerous to them," Meyers said. "Being in this business we are very concerned, and I feel like we are doing the necessary precautions."

Methodist Village is also asking that visitors and vendors only come from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. They plan to keep doing the extra protocols as long as necessary but possibly until June or even August.

At Methodist Village, they have more than 200 residents and 250 employees.

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