Equip health workers

THE efforts by the Government and its partners to prevent the spread, contain and mitigate this lung eating virus – coronavirus – is good and in the right direction.
While the preventative aspect of the pandemic has been handled well with the 14-days shut down, the curative aspect has been not been given significant attention.
Despite reporting an imported positive case from an expatriate in the country, PNG has registered its first positive case on the ground despite the expatriate’s departure.
It is likely that this positive case has already spread the virus in his path.
Right now, the health workers, surveillance and monitoring teams, checkpoints personnel, security forces and awareness teams should be fully-equipped with Personal Protective Equipments to carry out their designated duties in dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic.
For health workers, it is their duty to take care of the sick.
It is their duty to use whatever available resources to make sure the sick become well.
However, in a pandemic, the burden and safety placed on the health worker is completely different.
The working environment changes too.
Case management scenario also changes with case to case disease presentation that includes diagnosis, isolation and quarantine, admission, labour and delivery, Intensive Care Unit (ICU) admission and surgery, recovery and discharge quarantined.
Health workers managing coronavirus patients should not return home after work but keep in a quarantined facility set up for them.
There is no guarantee that their families will be safe from this virus when they return home.
It is an “angry and hungry respiratory virus”.
Health insurance does not cover pandemics.
Most, if not all fly-in expatriate workers, have left the country because of that when the shutdown became a state of emergency.
What will happen to a health worker or people involved with coronavirus pandemic if one or many of them die from this imported virus?
The fatality and mortality is the highest among the elderly and made worse by those with comorbidities as reported in those epicentres globally.
Most health facilities in the country lack vital resources and facilities.
For these hospitals to deal with a suspected or positive coronavirus case will be a time bomb in waiting, with cross-cutting casualties.
Hospitals in the country have put in coronavirus plans in advance but funding was not available.
Health workers over 55 years old, with or without comorbidities, should not be in the frontline to deal with coronavirus.
Life expectancy in PNG is in the 60s.
Mortality in the older age group is high as globally reported.
PNG will fall in the same enclosure.
Health workers below 55 years with comorbidities should not be on the front line either.
If there are no PPEs provided to health facilities and its workers dealing with coronavirus, and if no funding goes to health facilities, it is suicidal to put workers on the frontline in a pandemic that has reached 150 countries.
With the aging population in the health workforce, the Health Department and the Government should ask themselves if this is the right thing to do.
Respective health facilities management should ask themselves if putting workers at a risk is the right thing to do.
Would it be okay if a family loses their breadwinner so carelessly?
Health workers will do their job to serve.
But in this global pandemic, if no PPEs are available from the time of seeing a coronavirus case to investigation, admission (isolation, quarantine, ward, ICU) institution of treatment (medical, surgery, delivery in labour) and at quarantine discharge, and in the acumen of dealing with the pandemics of coronavirus, it would be absolutely insane to allow workers to see coronavirus cases without any protection.
Members of the National Doctors Association, you are also reminded that almost all health insurance providers around in the world do not provide cover for any pandemic diseases and neither does NDA care.
Therefore, members are reminded to talk to their immediate employer about what kind of protective measures will be available to them and what protection plan is in place for them to deal with coronavirus virus.
If nothing comforts or reassures them, members should not
put themselves in such a position where they could possibly become a victim of coronavirus.
Let us arrest creating an epicentre too.

Dr James Naipao,
National President,
National Doctors Association