Tami Photinos, Executive Director, The Prince Charles Hospital
Welcome to another week.
As mentioned in today’s message from the Metro North Incident Controller, Metro North has now moved to Tier 3 in its COVID-19 response plan, due to lower reported community transmission, and fewer hospitalisations and staff out of the workplace as COVID positive or close contacts.
While this allows us to resume some planned care, this needs to be done in a managed way. Our priority is still on ensuring we have adequate staff and resources for our COVID response work such as fever clinics, COVID patient care, and vaccination centres.
We will resume semi-urgent and long wait category 2 planned care, with the preference for virtual appointments where possible.
Key points in Tier 3:
- Only urgent elective surgery and procedures to deploy staff to COVID-related care.
- Outpatient appointments to be virtual, only urgent face to face where virtual is not clinically appropriate.
- Visitors per CHO direction.
- No students or volunteers onsite.
- Virtual meetings only, suspension of non-essential meetings.
- No face to face training, essential training to be delivered virtually.
Due to the change in Tier, I will be also reducing the number of staff updates from this week.
If you have any non-COVID-19 related stories or photos relating to the great work you or your team is doing, please share them with us.
Vaccination clinic relocation
Please be reminded that TPCH’s COVID-19 Vaccination Clinic has now relocated to the Infection Control Unit on Level 3, Clinical Sciences Building.
TPCH Pfizer Vaccine Clinic will operate from 1pm – 4pm, Mondays and Thursdays.
Note: This is a TPCH staff only clinic and will require an appointment.
Family members will need to access alternate testing clinics.
To book an appointment, please contact Infection Management on 3139 4894 and provide your name, mobile phone number and preferred appointment date and time. A vaccination nurse will contact you to confirm your appointment details.
New registrars welcomed
I would like to extend a warm welcome to the 122 new registrars who commenced at TPCH today. Some have moved from great distances such as the UK, while others have transferred from other Queensland Hospitals including the Princess Alexandra or Townsville. Registrars attended a virtual orientation today in line with current COVID requirements. These registrars will be given the opportunity to learn and develop alongside many of our highly talented and experienced clinicians as they advance in their medical career. We wish them well and extend a warm TPCH welcome as they commence their clinical roles.
Change to extended Café Operating Hours
Please be advised that The Café for The Common Good’s extended trading hours will continue until the end of this week. From today until Friday 11 February, the café will be open until 8.00pm. Following this, it will resume its normal hours of operation which are:
Monday to Friday: 7am to 6pm
Weekends: 8am – 3pm
My quote for today
“You can learn new things at any time in your life if you’re willing to be a beginner. If you actually learn to like being a beginner, the whole world opens up to you” – Barbara Shur
Tami Photinos
Executive Director