THE protective masks and goggles now worn at all times by staff in the Hunter's emergency departments are beginning to rub and ache.
But the fear and uncertainty of last year's COVID-19 wave has been replaced by confidence, Hunter New England's COVID-19 medical controller, Dr Paul Craven, says. For more than 500 days, the health district has kept the same basic approach to COVID-19.
"Since day one, our strategy has been to keep it out of hospital as much as we can, to make sure we're prepared with space in the hospitals, to make sure our staff are educated and have the right equipment, and to make sure we have the right PPE," Dr Craven said.
As the latest wave of COVID cases continues to grow in the region, hospital staff have been fit-tested for N95/P2 masks. Procedures have been put in place, and dedicated wards have been established should COVID cases, or suspected COVID cases, require treatment at the Hunter's hospitals.
And this time round, staff working in the "high risk" areas of our hospitals are all vaccinated for COVID-19.
"The feeling this time is different," Dr Craven said.
"We had fear last time. This time we have some confidence, and people are really coming together. Our ICU has capacity. We have multiple wards vacant. We also have the ventilators we purchased last year."
They had surged their contact tracing team, and were recruiting more. He understood there were frustrations about the lag between announcing a growing list of venues of concern.
"Sometimes people wonder why we don't put things up sooner - it's because it takes time to get the story right and accurate," Dr Craven said. "You can't put out inaccurate information because it can cause chaos. It is a lot of days to trace back, a lot of venues, a lot of QR codes, so it takes a lot of time for us to get the information."
Staff in the ED were wearing goggles and masks "at all times" to protect both themselves, and patients.
They don full PPE - gloves, gowns, goggles and masks - when treating patients with respiratory symptoms or those at risk of COVID.
Dr Craven said all health staff were making sacrifices at present - working longer shifts and longer hours.
But while last year there was praise for the region's frontline health workers, this year, there seemed to be a lot of public frustration. He called for kindness, and patience, when revealing some COVID testing clinics had jumped from swabbing 100 people a day, to 3500.
"There is a lot of comments made about people not getting the service they want, or getting what they expect of us," Dr Craven said. "We work as a very big system, a lot of the testing done in the community is not necessarily NSW Health but a lot of private providers as well. But everybody is working so hard trying to detect the virus, trying to keep you out of hospital, and trying to provide the care in hospital. For all the criticism we get, we have one of the best healthcare systems in the world."
