Medical Services, Executive Director: Dr Elizabeth Rushbrook

COVID-19 UPDATE

On Monday 31 October, the Public Health emergency declaration will be lifted. This means that most Chief Health Officer Directions will be revoked and COVID-19 will be managed via a new management framework contained within legislation passed in State Parliament this week.  This is an important change, now 33 months after the first emergency declaration on 29 January 2020. The new legislation allows the Chief Health Officer to issue a public health direction if satisfied the direction is reasonably necessary to:

• Prevent or respond to a serious risk to the public health system or the community as a result of COVID-19; or
• Give effect to decisions of National Cabinet or advice from national advisory bodies relating to the public health response to COVID-19.

Without directions, Metro North will revert to policies and procedures in place to manage infection control risks in our hospitals and services. On Monday, I will release a memo detailing our high level policy positions until such time as those are incorporated into relevant policies and procedures throughout our health service.

In short, from Monday the following will apply:

• Staff, contractors and/or students who are COVID-19 cases are not to enter a Metro North hospital, aged care or disability accommodation facility for seven days following their positive test result.  This includes parts of buildings or workplaces where any patients or residents of our service attend or are located.
• Staff, contractors and/or students who are COVID-19 cases and are free from symptoms (i.e. free from fever for 24 hours and free from acute respiratory symptoms) may return to work in non-clinical workplaces regardless of the number of days since their positive result. These staff must wear a face mask at work until seven days have passed following their positive result.
• Visitors who are COVID-19 cases are advised not to attend a Metro North hospital, aged care or disability accommodation facility for seven days following their positive test result if possible. If required to attend these facilities, visitors are requested to wear a face mask, and advise the location they visit that they are COVID-19 cases and follow infection control requirements (to manage the infection control risk) of that location for the period of their visit.
• General mask wearing recommendations (outside usual clinical requirements when caring for suspected and known infectious disease cases; and undertaking aseptic procedures) will be in accordance with the current level of COVID-19 community risk.  At this time, the prevalence of COVID-19 in our community is LOW. Further guidance in relation to general mask wearing in our Hospitals, Aged Care and Disability facilities will be provided on Monday.

I look forward to keeping you up to date in relation to our ongoing approach to COVID-19 via this format.

MEDICAL PROFESSION UPDATE

Fatigue. We have been working on some important new support tools to manage our medical workforce fatigue risk. In the coming weeks, we will be introducing a ‘medical fatigue dashboard’ for directors and managers to identify when rosters or worked shifts have increased fatigue risk and better enable them to put practices into place to manage that risk.  This will be a useful tool to help us all work together to manage fatigue.  I commend to you all the current suite of information and tools we have available for all medical staff about fatigue: Medical Fatigue Risk Management.

New opportunity available for training registrars – Clinician Researcher Training Program (CRTP).  I encourage all training registrars interested in a research career to consider this new opportunity. Further detail is available in the message from Executive Director, Metro North Research.

Regards,
Liz