Porters and cleaners as well as frontline healthcare staff appear to be at greater risk of Covid-19 infection, it has emerged.
Workers from black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) communities are also at higher risk of the disease than their white colleagues, a study by Oxford University Hospitals (OUH) NHS Foundation Trust revealed.
Research looked at the levels of risk faced by healthcare staff dealing with the pandemic caused by coronavirus.
It found that the overall figure for Covid-19 infection among BAME staff was 14.7 per cent, compared with 8.7 per cent for white healthcare workers.
Black and Asian staff were most at risk with infection rates of 17 per cent.
They also found that the chances of contracting coronavirus varied across different hospital departments, with those working in acute medicine (27.4 per cent) and porters and cleaners (18 per cent) at the highest risk of Covid-19 infection.
The findings have been published online in a preprint server known as medRxiv, which means it is yet to be peer-reviewed.
Terry Roberts, chief people officer at OUH, said “special steps” have been put in place by the trust to “ensure that all BAME staff working at OUH feel safe and supported”.
Almost 10,000 staff were tested both for presence of the virus and antibodies to the virus, in what is thought to be the first comprehensive research to investigate all staff groups across an institution.
Scientists combined data from both symptomatic and asymptomatic staff testing programmes. Results showed that 11 per cent of staff had suffered Covid-19 at some stage, with the figure climbing to 21 per cent for staff working on coronavirus wards.
Positive results were also more likely among those working in intensive care (9.9 per cent) and the emergency department (12.1 per cent), according to the researchers.
OUH said that, based on the findings, an infection prevention and control plan to minimise the spread of Covid-19 among staff and patients has been put in place.
Professor Meghana Pandit, chief medical officer of OUH, said: “We have drawn up recommendations for all staff across our four hospital sites, including portering and cleaning colleagues."
