Louise Oriti, Executive Director, Redcliffe Hospital
As expected, our COVID-19 response has continued to evolve and change. On Wednesday morning, Redcliffe Hospital and Metro North Health stepped up to tier three of our COVID-19 response plan.
The change was prompted by an increasing number of staff across Metro North unable to attend work either because they have COVID-19 or because they are close contacts.
It’s something we’ve been feeling here at Redcliffe too. Most days last week, we had around 30 staff unable to come to work because of COVID reasons. On Tuesday, that number had grown to 80. On Wednesday, it was 110. Today, it’s over 120. To put that into perspective, we now have around 5% of our hospital workforce unable to attend work.
This escalation in response tier will help us to manage that workforce challenge, better support our frontline staff, and continue to provide safe patient care.
On a practical level, these are the main changes at Redcliffe Hospital:
- Non-urgent planned care has been rescheduled
- Today’s Yarning Circle in the Healing Garden was cancelled
- Non-essential hospital meetings have been cancelled, and all others moved to Teams
- Our volunteers and consumers have been stood down from the hospital
- Face-to-face training has been postponed (except OVP, fire warden, and mandatory training).
We anticipate these changes will continue for the rest of this week, with further advice around timeframes for tier three to be advised by Metro North.
If you have any questions about how these changes will impact you or your area, please talk to your line manager or NUM.
We’ll be talking more about these changes in the Staff Forum this afternoon. The link for that session should be in your Outlook calendar. If you can, please join us at 3pm on Teams.
I listen to understand so we make the best decisions. #IamRedcliffe.
Louise Oriti
Executive Director
Redcliffe Hospital