Above: Dental assistant Danielle Kane.
As we’ve slowed down or temporarily closed some of our services in an effort to further protect our patients, consumers, aged care residents and staff from the spread of Coronavirus, some of our staff now sometimes have less to do and they’re commendably putting their hands up to help elsewhere.
We’ve been redeploying staff (mostly from our Dental Services which is now doing emergency dental work only) to all sorts of places. For example, this week four Dental Services workers and one Café Nosh worker helped out in our Linen Service, while another was the courier for the delivering of our COVID-19 screening tests to Geelong. Some are helping to serve food and running chores for our Mental Health Services acute inpatient unit. We’ve also got a Dental Services worker providing administrative support for our executive team and our health and wellbeing team; we’ve redeployed a health promotion officer to support our infection prevention team’s influenza vaccination program, and one of our occupational therapists is visiting our Mental Health Services acute inpatient unit to run some extra activities.
We want to make it clear that everyone participating in our redeployment program is very happy to be doing so, and that the necessary education and training is being provided.
‘This is a fantastic display of teamwork and helps to not only share the workload, but also helps us in our contingency planning work should we need to increase the amount of linen we wash due to increased patient activity. We’re so grateful, as an organisation, to have such wonderful people working for us,’ Service Development executive director Jamie Brennan says.
Our Linen Service launders close to 5,000kg of linen/day. This linen belongs to SWH, and many other health services, aged care facilities and GP clinics from Camperdown to the South Australian border, including Hamilton, Casterton and Coleraine. We collect and deliver.
—————————————————————————————-
Thank you to everyone in the community who’s contacted us this week to see if we need any ‘outside’ workforce support, as yet. At this stage we don’t need to go down this track BUT watch this space. If things change we’ll most definitely be putting a call to action out.
Above: Dentist Craig Gove and laundry hand Kerrie Hermans.
Above: Dental assistant Ellie Wilson and laundry hand Deborah Rollo.
Above: Dental assistant Rio Grayland and laundry hand Debbie Kelly.