Nick Loudon, the CEO/Managing Director of Envigor (and LASA board member), has drawn our attention to this 7am podcast by the team at The Saturday Paper – and it is a must-listen.
Journalist Osman Faruqi speaks about his report on how healthcare worker infections have contributed to the length of Victoria’s second wave.
Confidential documents leaked to the paper show that hospitals remain a key area of coronavirus transmission, because staff were not informed of outbreaks in their own hospital.
The Government refused to disclose which hospitals had outbreaks – unlike aged care which has all its outbreaks publicly available – until Mr Faruqi obtained the information which showed widespread outbreaks across a number of hospitals, including those housing aged care residents.
While healthcare workers and their close contacts make up the majority of new cases in Victoria, Mr Faruqi says the State Government continually downplayed the risks at work – before revealing that 80% of the 3,500-plus health care workers that had contacted COVID were infected at work.
His investigation showed the virus spread rapidly in the geriatric wards that were caring for elderly residents because they were not designed to accommodate COVID positive patients with lager multi-bed wards and wandering residents with dementia increasing the risk of transmission.
Despite Premier Daniel Andrews announcing more measures to protect healthcare workers including more PPE, training in infection control and COVID Safe plans, Mr Faruqi says doctors tell him the Government still wasn’t acting fast enough and the announcement of compulsory fit testing for new N95 masks had also come after healthcare worker infections continued to increase.
They are shocking allegations – not least because blame has been heaped on the Victorian aged care sector for spreading the virus.
We can’t help but return to Mr Andrews’ statement that he would not place his own mother in ‘private’ aged care and only in a Government-run home (after just topping up the state’s aged care sector with $30 million).
How many aged care residents were potentially infected in hospitals as a result of the Andrews’ Governments failure to prevent infections among hospital staff?
