A GP fighting the coronavirus pandemic has opened up about life on the frontline.
Dr Brian Higgins, from Galway Primary Care, has seen a number of diagnoses in the surgery - but is advising people fearful of catching the killer bug: Ditch the gloves.
He insists that the advice repeated to the public to social distance is crucial in the fight to prevent its spread.
He also debunks the myth that wearing gloves will keep you safe from contamination.
Dr Higgins told the Irish Mirror: “We’ve had a few (patients diagnosed).
“We’re a big practice so statistically, we were going to.
“If you know you’ve managed someone and you’ve had appropriate guidelines in and you’ve had your personal protective equipment on and protected all of your staff, you can be relaxed that you did the right thing.”
The GP says that while the country has been gripped by the Covid-19 crisis, patients with other ailments still need help.
His surgery has made some practical changes to adopt to social distancing guidelines and keep all patients and staff safe.
“Just because there is coronavirus, doesn’t mean that other health issues have disappeared and people should not be afraid to call their GP or ask for help if it’s something that’s not to do with coronavirus, because you don’t want people suffering unnecessarily.
He continued: “What we’re doing is we are running different clinics.
“On a Wednesday morning, the only people we allow into the clinic are children for vaccines.
“On a Thursday, we’re letting pregnant women in for their antenatal appointments.”
He continued: “Child immunisation is still so important and adult immunisation also.
“The data that is coming out now around the coronavirus is very young, so it is hard to interpret it in a meaningful way.
“But it does look like people who have had the flu vaccine and have had their pneumonia vaccine will have slightly better survival rates, probably because they don’t get two or three infections all at the one time.
“So if it’s even just making sure that elderly people are getting - double checking that they’ve got their pneumonia vaccine - that might protect them a little bit more, not from Coronavirus, but maybe from getting really sick with Coronavirus.”
He explained that there are many misconceptions circulating.
“It’s a huge amount of common sense.
“The funny thing is that people are saying ‘those HSE guidelines - there must be something else? there must be something more that you can do? There’s something they’re not telling us.
“There is nothing clever or nothing fancy or extra that you can do to prevent it, it really is just responsibly socially distancing.”
He also encourages patients to ditch the gloves.
“People are coming into me wearing gloves and I am asking them not to wear gloves, because what’s happening is people are putting on a pair of gloves when they’re leaving their house and they go around and they do three or four hours work and then they come home. But they’ve contaminated everything.
“They’ve contaminated their handbag, contaminated their phone, their car door, their steering wheel, the door on the front of their house - everywhere.
“And then they take their gloves off and throw them in the bin and they think ‘there I go, I’m grand.’
“An hour later they run out to the car to grab something and they don’t have their gloves on but they touch the car door and all of a sudden they’re contaminated.
“What I say to people is you’ll never see a doctor coming in lining up ten patients and wearing the same pair of gloves through every single patient.
“We change our gloves after every task because that’s what those gloves are designed to do.
“If you wear them for multiple tasks, all you’re doing is contaminating every task.
“People are better off not to wear gloves and to wash their hands regularly."
