ABSTRACT
Background: The Hospital Virgen de la Poveda, (Villa del Prado, Spain), assists patients in need of Continuous medical care, Rehabilitation or Palliative care;these patients have many risk-factors of COVID-19 morbility and mortality. With both health-care humanization and contagion-prevention purpo-ses, in July 2020 two patient visit protocols were im-plemented. The objective of this study is to describe these measures qualitatively and quantitatively. Methods: A context is provided regarding COVID-19 measures in this institution. The content and follow-up indicators of visit protocols (number of visits, of outbreaks, inpatients, etc.) and of their con-text were provided. The empirical outbreak probabi-lities were calculated, and hypothesis contrast was performed against no-visits (0%) and no visit-control (7-day cumulative incidence/habitant). Results: Two protocols were created. Accompanying was applied to Palliative Care cases (no appointments required, no time limits), and a short visits protocol was applied to the other patients (appointments for 1 weekly visit for 1-2 persons were given and visits last up to 45 minutes). In both protocols, visitors with symptoms or fever or particularly susceptible were for-bidden entrance. Between July and April 2021, 4,759 short-visit appointments were given and 7,544 total vi-sits took place (short visits, accompanying, exceptions). An outbreak was possibly attributed to short visits (pro-bability=0.021% [CI95%: 0.0005-0.1171%]) and two outbreaks were possibly attributed to visits globally (probability=0.0265% [IC95%: 0.0032-0.0958%]). Conclusions: Elaborating adapted, applica-ble and prospectively-evaluated protocols with pre-vention measures at multiple levels might succeed in minimizing the risk of adverse events (in this case, COVID-19