Not surprisingly SA Health has dropped the ball on protecting South Australian’s from COVID-19.
With the first cases being identified on February 2nd 2020; SA Health took 40 days to meet with SA Salaried Medical Officers Association (SASMOA) representatives about staffing and resourcing.
SASMOA is the union representing registered doctors in South Australia.
Regrettably, a few hours later, SASMOA posted;
Which strongly suggests that SA Health is approaching doctors and other health professionals with the departments usual adversarial rather than collaborative manner.
And, while SA Health is disregarding the health and safety of frontline staff, a local SA woman Karen Smartie has written about her own horrific account of dealing with health services after her son showed flu-like symptoms after returning from the US;
Adding insult to injury, the SA Liberal Government is still plowing ahead with the privatisation of SA Pathology;
We can only hope that the staff at South Australia’s public hospitals can hold out a little longer, but we’ve asked them to do it so often that it feels awful to ask more of them. Now more than ever South Australia’s doctors, nurses, allied health, and support staff need the support and cooperation of not just patients, but the department they work for.
Update: 2020-03-14
On Friday 13th, at 7:32 pm Brash Mag contacted SA Health via Twitter to ask them if they’ve told SA GPs (who are also part of the SA Health network) if they had bothered to tell them about their “strong plan to protect South Australia”, given the experience of Karen Smartie;
SA Health responded within 20 minutes;
Of course, on the face of it; one could assume that “information has been distributed” was very much in the past tense… but only a quick look at the meta-data of the public page for GPs leaves one slightly dubious with the meta-data saying it was updated on the March 13th, not February 17th as the page says.
In The Mean Time…
The Australia Department of Health has a good hand washing poster at: https://www1.health.gov.au/internet/main/publishing.nsf/Content/A1CCE88EB168930CCA257E35007F6927/$File/wash_dry_hands.pdf
