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From Staff Reports

AMERICUS – Exergen Corporation of Watertown, MA, provided 57 Exergen home Temporal Scanner thermometers and eight professional Temporal Scanner model thermometers to the South Georgia Technical College practical nursing students and programs on both the Americus and the Crisp County Center campuses recently.

Exergen Corporation, manufacturer of the only thermometer whose accuracy has been proven in more than 100 peer-reviewed, published clinical studies, and is the only non-invasive medically accurate thermometer available for home use, is providing every accredited school of nursing in the country one free Exergen Home Temporal Scanner for each student in its nursing program.  They also provided accredited schools a select number of professional Temporal Scanner models for use in their hands-on skills labs.

The South Georgia Technical College Foundation learned of the program and contacted Exergen officials.  Exergen provided nearly $7,000 worth of the home and professional Temporal Scanners to the SGTC practical nursing programs and its students.

“We are thrilled that Exergen donated these thermometers to our students,” said SGTC Practical Nursing Instructor Jennifer Childs.  “This allows each student to have their own accurate digital thermometer when they are doing clinical rotations and they can keep them after they complete the program.”

Childs was also pleased with the professional models that the students can use in the hands-on skills labs on the Americus and Crisp County Center campuses.  “The professional models will allow us to provide valuable hands-on training to our students in the labs and will provide them with a working knowledge of the professional models in the hospitals, nursing homes, and doctor’s offices,” explained Childs.

 

According to Francesco Pompei, Ph.D., CEO of Exergen, “Covid created a nightmare in terms of how people’s temperatures are being taken. The unexpected necessity of public screenings enabled a wave of inaccurate, non-contact infrared thermometers (NCITs) to flood the market. Not only was this utterly irresponsible to the millions of people whose fevers were being missed, but to nurses and nursing students who were misled to believe that NCITs are accurate.”

Numerous studies prove that NCITs are inaccurate. In fact, a recent study ^[1] published by the FDA proves that non-contact thermometers fail to reliably detect fevers and that they fail to be within the accuracy specifications as advertised in manufacturers’ instructions for use and labeling. The study was undertaken because of the NCIT’s high probability for producing false negative readings close to the CDC fever threshold. It also sought to evaluate their adherence to FDA labeling requirements and in both cases, the non-contact thermometers failed.

Exergen SVP Dr. Marybeth Pompei, a former RN, said that Exergen wanted to do something. “We must educate our nursing students that nothing is more important in screening for fever than an accurate thermometer. All nurses need to be able to take an accurate temperature non-invasively, and that starts with having an accurate non-invasive thermometer. We hope every nursing school in the country will contact us.”