Many Victorian health workers exposed to COVID will avoid extended isolation and be allowed to continue working as part of a new furloughing policy to prevent hospitals being paralysed by staff absences.
The move has given special allowances to vaccinated workers and comes as the Victorian government activated a fourth COVID-19 hospital in response to the growing outbreak at the Royal Melbourne Hospital.
The Royal Melbourne Hospital has furloughed hundreds of staff in the past week.Credit:Justin MacManus
There are now a string of mostly small hospital clusters in Melbourne, including at The Royal Children’s Hospital, and emergency departments at Sunshine Hospital, The Alfred and Northern Hospital. More than 500 Melbourne hospital workers have been furloughed in recent days, largely at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, which has the largest cluster – eight staff, seven patients and a visitor.
The RMH has gone into ambulance bypass mode, meaning only ambulances carrying seriously ill patients are advised to use the hospital. Members of the public are still able to access the hospital off the street.
The fresh furlough guidance, which is being used at the RMH, allows some lower-risk staff to return to work after five days rather than 14 if they test negative. They must receive daily saliva tests and clear PCR tests on day nine and 13.
An internal RMH memo, seen by The Age, says that fully vaccinated workers who spent less than an hour in the same ward as a COVID-infected person may be able to avoid being furloughed if they continue to be tested regularly, wear high-grade PPE and work at only one site. Their families and other housemates will not have to isolate at all.
About three-quarters of Victoria’s 240,000 healthcare workers are fully vaccinated and nearly all have received one dose.
Rising COVID cases could mean a staffing crisis for Victoria’s healthcare system, and the Australian Medical Association says the new guidance was part of recognising this risk, by introducing less onerous isolation requirements for those at lesser chance of having the disease.
“Similar to last year, we are not going to face an ICU capacity crisis … or a ventilator crisis. It’s a workforce crisis,” said Sarah Whitelaw, vice-president of the AMA’s Victorian branch.
But there is still caution from the AMA over how the plan will work in practice. Others are also concerned that not enough has been done since thousands of health staff caught COVID last year to prevent them being exposed in the first place.
Staff who qualify for the new furloughing arrangement will have to don additional protective gear. Andrew Hewat, the assistant secretary of the Victorian Allied Health Professionals Association, said ideally workers would already be wearing higher levels of protective gear.
“This is a reactive response, rather than a proactive response,” he said.
A Health Department spokesman said the new guidance was evolving and its purpose was to “protect and preserve the healthcare workforce, and where appropriate and clinically safe, limit unnecessary impacts of staff furlough requirements”.
In response to the furloughing crisis, the Andrews government said this week that it will recruit 350 overseas healthcare workers, mostly doctors, to add to the state’s health workforce.
The new policy to fortify Victoria’s healthcare system came in the same week the Northern Hospital in Epping was added to the group of three hospitals – the RMH, Alfred and Box Hill – designated for COVID-19 patients.
Two healthcare sector sources, speaking anonymously to detail private conversations, said several hospital chief executives pushed back against the government’s plan to, in most cases, transfer COVID-19 patients to one of three designated hospitals. Other hospitals including the children’s and women’s hospitals are used in special circumstances.
The hospital leaders raised concern that non-COVID hospitals may become complacent on enforcing strict PPE protocols, and believed COVID-19 patients may not be able to receive certain types of specialist care at the COVID hospitals. Some were concerned the patient transfer process increased risk of infection.
The AMA’s Victorian branch president Roderick McRae said more hospitals would probably need to be activated as COVID-19 hospitals as mystery cases continue to rise and more people present in hospitals with the virus.
A Health Department document distributed to hospitals in June said the strategy to only have a few COVID hospitals was designed to “reduce the exposure and movement of COVID-19 positive patients across the health system ... [and] minimise the disruption of non-COVID care within the health system, such as elective surgery and outpatient service delivery”.
The latest Royal Melbourne Hospital cluster began with a patient from Shepparton who was in the hospital since mid-August but wasn’t tested for COVID-19 before their surgery, as had been previously mandatory. The requirement has since been reinstated.
Dr Whitelaw said a coronavirus virus exposure in a single hospital had a ripple effect across the entire health system, as staffing shortages resulted in extra pressure on neighbouring hospitals, as well as extra demand on already exhausted staff who were not furloughed.
Mr Hewat, who sits on Victoria’s healthcare worker infection prevention taskforce, was concerned by reports earlier this week from some of his members identified as primary close contacts that they had been told they may be still required to come into work.
He said he’d since been reassured by government and department officials that this would not happen.
Mr Hewat said the new furloughing guidance had taken too long, given the deadly Royal Melbourne Hospital cluster in July and August last year which saw some 262 healthcare workers and support staff fall sick.
It’s suspected that some of the around 3000 Victorian health staff who acquired COVID at work were exposed in their break rooms when they weren’t wearing protective gear, but Mr Hewat said there was still not always safe places for people to eat their meals, so people were having their breaks at their work stations.
Stay across the most crucial developments related to the pandemic with the Coronavirus Update. Sign up for the weekly newsletter.
Aisha Dow is health editor with The Age and a former city reporter.
Paul Sakkal is a Victorian political reporter for The Age.
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMikwFodHRwczovL3d3dy50aGVhZ2UuY29tLmF1L3BvbGl0aWNzL3ZpY3RvcmlhL2Z1cmxvdWdoLXNoaWZ0LXRvLWZvcnRpZnktaG9zcGl0YWwtd29ya2ZvcmNlLWdpdmUtZnVsbHktdmFjY2luYXRlZC1mcmVlZG9tLXRvLXdvcmstMjAyMTA4MjUtcDU4bHByLmh0bWzSAZMBaHR0cHM6Ly9hbXAudGhlYWdlLmNvbS5hdS9wb2xpdGljcy92aWN0b3JpYS9mdXJsb3VnaC1zaGlmdC10by1mb3J0aWZ5LWhvc3BpdGFsLXdvcmtmb3JjZS1naXZlLWZ1bGx5LXZhY2NpbmF0ZWQtZnJlZWRvbS10by13b3JrLTIwMjEwODI1LXA1OGxwci5odG1s?oc=5
2021-08-26 05:44:28Z
CAIiEKNzhPfkcVG9NAIbK7Q3fzAqGQgEKhAIACoHCAowgNjvCjCC3s8BMOeLnAY
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Furlough shift to fortify hospital workforce, give fully vaccinated freedom to work - The Age"
Post a Comment