Official: Staff vaccination low

By LULU MARK
WITH the current surge in Covid-19 cases, the Port Moresby General Hospital (PMGH) is receiving an average of 10 patients a day but the vaccination of its staff is still low, an official says.
PMGH is a 1,200-bed level 7 national referral and teaching hospital with more than 1,600 staff who serve more than a million people from the National Capital District (NCD), Central and Gulf.
Chief executive officer Dr Paki Molumi said the high number of the Covid-19 patients had put more strain on the hospital’s resources because apart from the Covid-19, there were other diseases that needed to be managed.
Dr Molumi said close to 200 staff have had the Covid-19 and were isolated which had resulted in the hospital scaling down its services last month.
“Most of the staff were asymptomatic but were detected through tests and some of them had very mild symptoms,” he said.
“Many have contracted the virus outside and some from within the hospital.
“For patients that are coming in, we have a positivity rate of between 40 to 60 per cent, which means 4 to 6 out of every 10 patients that presents symptoms are tested positive of the Covid-19.
“This is the test we are running for symptomatic cases but if we were to run tests for asymptomatic, with the population, the number would be higher.”
Dr Molumi said with the trend, around 330 staff (which included nurses, doctors, and support staff) at the hospital have been vaccinated (from the 8,000 AstraZeneca vaccines that were donated by Australia for frontline health workers).
“We had 160 medical officers (70 per cent) vaccinated,” he said.
“Unfortunately, our nurses numbers had been low with 25 of our 800 nurses have been vaccinated.
“We are still advocating for nurses, who are working in the frontline, to be get the vaccines.”
Dr Molumi said yesterday marked the 272nd day of the Covid-19 operations and about 350 patients had passed through the Covid-19 ward, with 35 patients at the extension of PMGH and 30 at the Taurama Aquatic Centre (TAC).
“The numbers would have been higher but we are transferring patients to TAC and looking after the critical cases here,” he said.