Yahoo News Victoria reports 911 healthcare workers have Covid-19, after daily rise of 101
There are now 911 healthcare workers with active infections of Covid-19 in Victoria, a rise of 101 since Thursday. Hospitals are already under pressure as nurses are diverted to tackle the crisis in aged care homes and 607 people in the state’s hospitals with the virus.
Victoria’s chief health officer, Prof Brett Sutton, said on Friday it was “a very concerning number, it is a very big number” that was placing “stresses and strains on staffing”.
“In our hospital system, nurses are more represented in these healthcare workers numbers than doctors,” he said. “The number of doctors is much less. That, I think, relates to the closeness of interaction that nurses are engaged in with their care provision. But I think a lot of the numbers in healthcare workers are actually aged care workers and some of the ancillary staff in healthcare.”
Related: Victorian nurses ask for urgent PPE as more than 730 health workers sick with Covid-19
Nurses have expressed increasing concerns in recent weeks about the infections affecting their workforce. Hundreds more nurses have been furloughed due to exposure to infected cases while they await the results of Covid-19 testing. Sutton said “it is hard to know” why so many healthcare workers were getting infected.
“This is not my area,” he said. “The chief medical officer [Prof Brendan Murphy] is looking into this. It does require really significant investigation to try to ascertain where healthcare workers have picked up their infection. Some of it will clearly be in the hospital setting, in the aged care setting. Some of it is outside. But it’s not always easy to make a final determination because people don’t necessarily know that they’ve been in contact with a positive case, either inside work or outside of work.”
On Friday, Victoria recorded 450 new cases of the virus and 11 more deaths, in people ranging in age from their 50s to 90s.
Safer Care Victoria, the peak state authority for quality and safety improvement in healthcare, is now working with hospital CEOs to identify issues. The Age reported that at least three Victorian healthcare workers, including a young trainee doctor, were in intensive care units after contracting the virus.
The Australian Society of Anaesthetists (ASA) said it was “seriously alarmed at the increase in healthcare workers” with the virus. Its president, Dr Suzi Nou, said not enough was being done to protect frontline workers.
“Existing infection control guidelines in Victorian hospitals are clearly not protecting healthcare workers and our frontline workers are not being provided with adequate respiratory protection,” Nou said. “We are growing increasingly concerned by the lack of health and safety expertise being engaged by the healthcare industry to implement fit-for-purpose, risk-based control strategies to manage the hazards associated with caring for Covid-19 infection in healthcare settings.
“We continue to call for P2/N95 masks to be mandated in high-risk clinical areas when interacting with known or suspected Covid-19 cases and for these healthcare workers to be offered fit-testing.”
Meanwhile, there is concern that student nurses and trainee doctors with less experience in PPE and infectious disease are being asked to fill health worker gaps. On Thursday, Ballarat Health Service in Victoria confirmed a nursing student had tested positive to the virus.
“Contact tracing with staff, patients and other students is under way. All patients on the ward deemed a close contact of the student will be tested as a precaution, and their families are being contacted,” the health service said in a statement.
Naomi Kemp, the chair of the Australian Institute of Health and Safety, told Guardian Australia that young workers were over-represented in injury statistics compared with older and more experienced workers. “We are putting them into an already bad situation,” she said.
“Because of their lack of experience, young workers have a unique risk profile which means they may not perceive when something becomes unsafe and it isn’t effective to rely on them to ask questions or speak up with concerns. Employers have a responsibility to provide a safe and healthy workplace.” The institute is calling for immediate government action to stop the spread of Covid-19 among healthcare workers, after its examination of current health and safety standards in healthcare found they were inadequate for the current crisis.
Kemp said that current health and safety practice gave the lie to the assumption that hospitals were some of Australia’s safest workplaces.
“The current infection rate is unacceptable,” she said. “But more tragically, it is preventable. Workers on many building sites currently have better protection than our healthcare workers when it comes to personal protective equipment, protocols around common work and recreation areas and transmission management.”
Ross Lomazov is a third-year medical student with Melbourne University, on placement in rural Victoria. During the placement, he has conducted Covid-19 swabs. “We are provided with full PPE and training for this,” he said. But he said there was concern among the student cohort of exposure to Covid-19.
“Already one student at the university, located at the Western hospital, has tested positive – it is strongly believed they picked it up on placement,” Lomazov said. “There is also concern about adequate PPE supply and financial remuneration – some students mention being paid minimum wage, which they believe is unfair during such a situation.” He said students did everything from swabbing through to contact tracing and administration tasks.
“To keep our health system running as efficiently and cheaply as possible, there is not much slack in the system when it comes to the labour force,” he said. “As such, when there is a large surge of patients needing care, the system gets disrupted and turns to additional help.”
But junior doctors, who had graduated university and were undergoing further training, were also at risk, said Dr Hash Abdeen, the chair of the Australian Medical Association’s Council of Doctors in Training. He said a significant portion of infected health workers were in their 20s and 30s.
“They are often the ones taking swabs and the first people patients see, but they are also not in positions of power,” he said. “They may not feel empowered to ask for PPE or to speak up.”
