Hospitals in Brabant are going to ask some employees who are infected with the corona virus to come to work after all. They do this to prevent operations and other interventions from being canceled due to staff shortages. That says Bart Berden, chairman of the Regional Consultation Acute Care in our province.
Since carnival, many hundreds of hospital employees have been at home with corona. According to Berden, this threatens to endanger acute and urgent care. In some departments, absenteeism is as high as 20 percent. In recent days, that increased rapidly because many staff tested positive.
Approach like the flu
“We see an enormous amount of corona infections, without people having many complaints. It now looks more like the flu than corona as we knew it two years ago. To ensure that we as hospitals can continue to provide all the care, we are now also going to approach it more like the flu,” says Berden.
However, there are strict conditions attached to this new policy. Only people who are indispensable and who work in critical departments are asked to work. Critical departments are, for example, the emergency room, intensive care and operating rooms.
Voluntary
Berden emphasizes that staff are not forced to work and that their commitment is only requested in departments where care cannot otherwise continue. “It’s about the willingness and voluntariness of our people.”
Special measures apply to prevent infected employees from infecting patients and colleagues. For example, they wear better protective equipment, such as the type IIR mouth-nose masks. Berden: “In this way patient safety is not jeopardized.”
Closed operating rooms
If hospitals did not ask employees with corona this, says Berden, they risk having to scale down care again. This is already happening in the Jeroen Bosch Hospital in Den Bosch, where a number of operating rooms are closed due to staff loss. The Elisabeth-TweeSteden Hospital in Tilburg will close one surgery ward this weekend.
“That is dramatic for the people whose surgery has already been cancelled. The number of corona patients in hospitals in Brabant is finally almost at the level that we can provide all regular care again. We don’t want to take another bite out of that,” says Berden.
Inspection
Patients are not informed if they are helped by an employee with corona. “This is really a break in the trend,” says Berden. “Corona was so special that we took very special measures. But the omikron variant is much more like the flu. And so we are now taking flu-like measures: even then we ask someone to work if they feel good enough.”
According to Berden, the Health and Youth Care Inspectorate (IGJ) has been informed about the new policy. This indicates that healthcare institutions may indeed ask staff infected with corona to come to work. But, the IGJ writes, only in exceptional cases and under certain conditions.
Contamination peak
In two weeks, Berden hopes that the peak infection among staff will be over. Then this new policy can go back into the fridge.
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