Scott Morrison did not receive any advice from the Tasmanian public health director before he accused a healthcare worker of not telling the truth to the state’s contact tracing team, earning the federal government another rebuke from Tasmanian authorities.
Authorities learned on Thursday night the healthcare worker had worked at three nursing homes as well as two hospitals before testing positive to Covid-19, prompting the federal government to order the mass testing of all staff and patients at those nursing homes.
Morrison told Hobart radio on Friday the health worker had previously not told the truth when asked about his movements.
“We’ve had someone down there not tell the truth to the contact tracers about where they’d been and who they’d been with and that means that a lot of people have been put at risk in north-west Tasmania,” Morrison said.
But the director of public health, Dr Mark Veitch, said there was no suggestion the health worker had not been open with contact tracers, only that he had realised, after his initial interview, that he may have been showing symptoms earlier, causing authorities to “widen the net”.
Veitch said no one from his office had briefed the prime minister on the case and that contact tracers “might not always pull out all the information that we need when we ask the questions the first time”.
It’s the second time in a week that federal authorities have been publicly contradicted about the situation in Tasmania, after the national chief medical officer Brendan Murphy backtracked on a claim that the outbreak on Tasmania’s north-west coast was linked to an “illegal dinner party” of healthcare workers.
It comes as more than 150 staff at Mersey community hospital in Devonport, also in north-west Tasmania, wrote to the state government complaining of a “breakdown of trust” after a senior emergency doctor was told not to speak to staff, raising concerns about the hospital’s ability to manage a coronavirus outbreak in the region.
The letter raised concerns about availability of personal protective equipment and called for stronger infection control protocols to be introduced.
The staff also called on the health minister, Sarah Courtney, to “remove the restriction on communication” imposed on the director of the emergency departments at the Mersey and North West Regional hospitals, saying she was “respected for standing up for staff and patient safety”.
The health department has been contacted for comment.
Mersey community hospital has become the centre of the health response to a Covid-19 cluster on Tasmania’s north-west coast, after the North West Regional and North West private hospitals in Burnie were closed by the premier, Peter Gutwein, on Sunday.
Patients, including some with the disease, were transferred 60km along the coast to the Mersey on Monday. Courtney promised the hospital would have pre-positioned piles of PPE on hand and would be managed in accordance with advice from infection control experts.
In the letter, hospital staff said that promise was “not delivered upon and has since had an enormous, snowballing effect on staff wellbeing and anxiety”.
They said the patient transfer had “caused major unrest and undue stress to staff” and that safety for patients and staff had been “breached”.
The letter said patients and staff who had tested positive to Covid-19 had been identified as having been in coronavirus-free wards and requested the entire hospital be regarded as a coronavirus hotspot, which would mean stepping up infection control measures and staffing levels.
“Our staff, medical, nursing and clerical, across the North West are repeatedly raising numerous issues to management with no response,” the letter said.
Courtney told reporters on Friday she had spoken to the head of the Tasmanian health department and the state’s chief medical officer immediately after receiving the letter that morning and asked them to investigate.
Courtney said most of the issues raised by staff were already being addressed, and that according to her advice there were “appropriate levels” of pre-positioned PPE at the hospital.
“However if this number of my staff are obviously very concerned then I have asked for this to be investigated further,” she said. “We need to make sure that our staff not only are supported but are feeling supported … I want to make sure that we are taking all of the measures that we need to both practically in terms of the PPE we have deployed, but also working with our staff during a time of very high anxiety.”
She said the government had been taking advice from infection disease specialists on the set up of the wards at the Mersey, and that protecting staff and patients was an “extraordinarily high priority of mine”.
Among the concerns raised is the reopening of the emergency department at the North West Regional hospital, which Gutwein said might happen as early as Friday afternoon.
Courtney said the emergency department “will be open when it needs to be opened”.
