Dear colleagues,
A week is a very long time in the pandemic. This week has seen dozens of our staff go into home quarantine and isolation due to the Indooroopilly COVID cluster. This has been challenging for us as a health service and for those individuals on a personal level.
Key achievements:
- Reactivated our Virtual Ward and Virtual ED
- Stood up a vaccine clinic for airport workers
- Supported thousands of people in mandatory home and hotel quarantine
- Identified more than 100 potential exposure sites
- Tested 223,970 people through fever clinics to date
- Set up a dedicated staff testing clinic
- Administered 220,359 vaccine doses to date
- Delivered 12,298 fit tests to date
- Transferred outpatient appointments to virtual care
- Continued to support the backpacker outbreak.
At this stage, the South East Queensland lockdown direction is until 4pm on Sunday. However, even if the lockdown is not extended, we will continue working from home arrangements until COB Monday to avoid last minute confusion.
I encourage you to book a vaccine appointment for Pfizer or AZ as soon as possible. The Metro North Vaccination Service has provided additional opportunities on Monday and Wednesday next week for staff to get vaccinated. If you would like to take up this opportunity, please register via the Queensland Health vaccine registration page. A private booking link for staff has been set up by Community and Oral Health and Digital Metro North.
I want to say an enormous thank you and well done to the Metro North Public Health Unit who have been on the COVID frontline since the very beginning and this week stepped it up a gear to manage the current cluster on top of the recent backpacker outbreak.
And thank you to all staff all your work this week and always caring for Queenslanders and each other. Unfortunately I also need to remind staff to abide by the Code of Conduct around the use of social media.
Our employee assistance service Benestar will be holding a staff self care session via Teams on Monday from 10-10.30am.
Please continue to be kind to each other.
Regards,
Jackie