Since the start of this August 2021 community outbreak, frontline staff across the whole of Auckland have had to step-up amid a ‘game-changing’ Delta variant of Covid-19.
As the region heads into its third week of a hard lockdown, spare a thought for those health workers on the frontline. In the Counties-Manukau DHB area, they include hospital staff, NGOs and health providers working around the clock in very trying conditions.
“I’m incredibly humbled by the work of my frontline colleagues, and it’s just so important that we keep supporting them,” says Fepulea’i Margie Apa, CEO of Counties-Manukau DHB.
“We’ve been rapidly training a lot more vaccinators and swabbers or testers so that we can swap out the workforce, and that workforce is available to support not just our DHB-run sites but also our NGOs and providers.
“We know everybody’s working hard out there.”
Fepulea’i says strict guidelines and protocols are in place for the protection of staff and the public, especially in hospitals, however resources have had to be stretched over the greater metro Auckland area.
“There are areas where we are treating Covid patients and we have a few across the city. I think, as at 7am this morning, we have 37 across all our hospitals in metro Auckland.
“In our hospitals, we have what we call isolation rooms, or negative pressure rooms, that are set up to make sure the airflow doesn’t allow the spread of the virus.
“So all of those procedures and protocols, having the availability of m95 masks, which cover the whole face, as well as being fully kitted up, we’ve got a lot of processes and procedures in place to protect our staff, and our staff are very good at sticking to them and wearing them in the right places.
“But we do want to encourage and make sure that people do get a rest,” Fepulea’i says.
“This has been probably the longest outbreak that we will work through, and it’s important that everybody gets to the end of it well rested and just feeling that they’ve kept their families safe. So big shout out to our frontline.”
