If you’ve been receiving our emails, then you know we are open and that we’ve been working hard to enhance our guests’ experience, while also providing a safer environment. Last March, we established new community health guidelines for everyone on our campus, which allowed us to remain open.
Here are some of the steps we’ve taken to ensure OHI is the safest and healthiest place you could be outside of your own home.
Our 3-step guest screening process:
- Step 1 - At the time of reservation: We pre-screen to qualify guests for on-campus stays. Anyone experiencing cold or flu-like symptoms will be required to book their reservation 4 weeks after they are symptom-free.
- Step 2 - Before guests arrive: We check in with our guests 3-5 days before their arrival to ensure they qualify to be on our campus.
- Step 3 - On arrival: Per CDC protocols, we monitor temperatures of all incoming guests, using non-contact thermometers. We will continue to take guests’ temperatures at their request.
Smaller cohorts: We have fewer people on campus, including guests, staff and missionaries. OHI San Diego is limited to 60 guests on our 2-acre campus; OHI Austin is limited to 20 guests on our 14-acre campus.
Physical distancing: We support physical distancing by booking our guests in single-occupancy rooms (one person per room), keeping 6-feet of distance between us at all times, and limiting the number of guests allowed in each classroom. This allows us to balance staying connected with each other while safely practicing physical distancing.
Trained staff: From the moment we became aware of the COVID-19 back in March of 2020, our staff immediately established safety protocols for the OHI community:
- We formed a compliance team to actively monitor the COVID-19 situation to ensure we not only follow the most-current CDC and county-prescribed safety protocols, but to ensure we exceed those standards.
- Before each work shift, if one of our staff members or missionaries exhibit any symptoms of cold or flu, they do not come to work.
- For those who do come to work - before every shift - each employee and missionary is required to take their temperature and if they exhibit a temperature of 100-degrees Fahrenheit or higher, they are sent home.
- We require COVID testing for our employees and missionaries on a bi-weekly basis.
Food handling: Food is solely handled by our trained kitchen staff. Our kitchen staff wear gloves, face masks, and face shields during food preparation and during mealtime service.
Clean facilities: From the very first moment we became aware of the COVID-19 crisis, we put a comprehensive safety plan in place and set out to create an infection-free “safety bubble.” We have taken precautions to provide a safe and sacred environment. We follow a comprehensive safety plan that involves three major pillars: preventing infectious diseases from entering the OHI campus; sterilizing the campus, guest rooms, and public areas to reduce the likelihood of disease transmission; and conducting ongoing temperature checks and Covid-19 testing for our employees. OHI is the safest place to be outside your home.
- In all guest rooms, common areas, and kitchens, we use electrostatic spray disinfection systems, and we use only safe, non-chemical cleaners.
- Our guest rooms, classrooms, and large common areas have Molekule air purifiers, which destroy a wide range of pollutants, including allergens, volatile organic compounds, bacteria, mold, and viruses.
- We increased sanitation in all of our departments across our campuses, Including regular cleaning of doorknobs, light switches, and other surfaces around our campuses. Additionally, we sanitize and deep-clean our kitchens and community bathrooms on a regular basis.
- We put extra emphasis on keeping our dining hall and water stations sanitized before, during, and after mealtimes.
- We continue to provide alcohol-based hand-sanitizer stations in a variety of places on our campuses (public bathrooms, classrooms, etc.) – especially areas that concern food (dining area, wheatgrass juice room, and food prep classrooms).