The Heroes of Groote Schuur recently celebrated the medical team tasked with caring for the nurses and doctors exposed to Covid-19.
Cape Town, South Africa (28 January 2021) – While doctors and nurses look after us, who looks after them? There is a dedicated medical team at the Groote Schuur Hospital that works to protect all the hospital staff, by providing them with much-needed support and care.
The Staff Health Clinic has been tasked with administrating all health protocols for Groote Schuur employees. The issue PPE to everyone and do regular health checks to make sure each person is fighting fit.
Should a staff member be exposed to Covid, they are screened and quarantined. Once vaccines become available, this medical team will be the ones to make sure each staff member gets their protective jab.
Not only do they focus on Covid-related issues, they still manage all their other jobs. They are there to help any staff that face challenges and accidents at work, especially in case of needle injuries. This means when a nurse or doctor accidentally gets pricked by a needle meant for a patient, the medical team will take all the steps to prevent the risk of HIV transmission or other infections.
This is their story…
“As the Staff Health Clinic, we fall under Occupational Health and Safety, and basically, our role is to make the hospital a safer environment so that our staff can function optimally. We ensure that staff have the proper PPE and make sure that everyone is fit for this battle. We also screen and quarantine staff that have had high-risk contact or show symptoms. It’s a bunch of admin work and behind-the-scenes work, but we do work hard since Covid started.
With this, we are still doing our other work like handling needle stick injuries and other emergencies that we have to attend to immediately. You know if someone has been exposed to potentially infectious bodily fluids we have to protect them and prevent them from contracting HIV and other infectious diseases.
We also see people from outside the hospital – forensic workers, paramedics, students – so it’s not only Groote Schuur Hospital staff that we see. And we do primary health care for staff that don’t have medical aid.
We have been tasked with managing the rollout of the vaccine at the hospital, so we are busy trying to work out how to do that with social distancing and making sure no one gets sick. With the flu vaccine, we can just do it in a boardroom and people can come in bunches but now we have to plan very carefully. We have over 3 500 staff, so it’s going to be difficult.
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There’s definitely been an increased workload in this second wave. And we are still dealing with other things, for example, there are still people in the boiler room who are exposed to dust, and we have to make a plan to sort them out so we cannot put everything on hold any more for Covid. And our numbers are way higher than the first wave.
To date, we have 880 staff members that have had Covid. So that’s nearly a third of all staff. And we see each of them at least three times for paperwork afterwards, so we are really overwhelmed.” – Staff Health Clinic Team.
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