There are many things you can do to prepare for flu season. The easiest tasks involve personal hygiene for your staff, and hard surface cleaning and disinfecting.

General flu prevention begins with good hand hygiene. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recommends thorough and frequent hand washings and the use of hand sanitizers as a way to prevent infection. Waterless hand sanitizers can be placed in convenient locations wherever there is high guest and employee traffic. This promotes increased hand hygiene and decreases the likelihood of spreading germs.

Another easy way to reduce the spread of germs is to encourage good cough etiquette -- covering coughs correctly. The Center for Disease Control has materials online including this Cover your Cough poster for staff break rooms.

The best way to prevent the spread of H1N1 disease is to follow the same precautions recommended to control seasonal influenza. These include cough etiquette, social distancing (including staying home when ill), hand hygiene and disinfection of contaminated hard, nonporous surfaces.

For Avendra customers, please see a complete set of materials to help you fight the flu season at myAvendra.com.