Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

Over the past two weeks, some 18 nurs­es at the Port-of-Spain Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal have been test­ed for COVID-19 and placed in­to im­me­di­ate quar­an­tine.

Ac­cord­ing to the T&T Reg­is­tered Nurs­es’ As­so­ci­a­tion pres­i­dent Idi Stu­art, this is not the first such oc­cur­rence and it is ex­pect­ed as par for the course in the fight against the virus.

“There have been sev­er­al in­stances where staff had been ex­posed to pos­i­tive cas­es. While there is a screen­ing process for in­com­ing pa­tients, it has not pre­vent­ed pa­tients with un­der­ly­ing ill­ness­es from en­ter­ing—par­tic­u­lar­ly COVID-19,” he told Guardian Me­dia in a tele­phone in­ter­view yes­ter­day.

Ac­cord­ing to Stu­art, eight nurs­es from the Port-of-Spain Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal were swabbed and placed in­to quar­an­tine last week while 10 were swabbed over the course of this week. Some were al­so be­ing swabbed yes­ter­day.

How­ev­er, Stu­art be­lieves this oc­cur­rence, cou­pled with the move­ment of nurs­es out of re­gion­al health au­thor­i­ties to the par­al­lel health­care sys­tem to di­rect­ly treat with COVID-19 pa­tients, is now plac­ing the North West Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty un­der stress for nurs­ing staff.

“Right now, man­age­ment is find­ing it ex­treme­ly dif­fi­cult to be able to prop­er­ly man the in­sti­tu­tions. They are do­ing the best that they can but it re­quires sig­nif­i­cant­ly more nurs­ing per­son­nel to re­place those who have been placed on quar­an­tine leave,” Stu­art said.

He al­so raised con­cerns over the sani­ti­sa­tion prac­tices at the hos­pi­tal. He said the tardy sani­ti­sa­tion of ar­eas where sus­pect­ed COVID-19 pa­tients and those who sub­se­quent­ly test­ed pos­i­tive posed a risk to health­care work­ers and oth­er pa­tients.

“What we are ask­ing the au­thor­i­ties to do is to have time­ly and con­stant and per­sis­tent sani­ti­sa­tion of units fol­low­ing con­firmed or sus­pect­ed cas­es be­ing placed on the ward. Once that hap­pens, it would re­duce the chance of spread among staff and amongst pa­tients,” he said.

Guardian Me­dia reached out to the North West Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty for com­ment but did not get a re­sponse up to last evening.