Some patients may be developing Covid19 st St Luke’s but the General Manager of the hospital says the chances of that are very low.
The Carlow / Kilkenny facility’s struggling to deal with high numbers of Covid19 patients and has had to suspend all outpatient clinic and elective surgeries.
The latest government figures showed there were 33 people being treated for the coronavirus at the hospital locally overnight with three cases confirmed in the past day and two more suspected of having the virus.
Last evening Kilkenny recorded 11 new incidences of the virus across the county while Carlow saw a further nine.
On KCLR’s The Way It Is last evening General Manager Anne Slattery said “Some people, even though we swab everybody on admission after a few days in the hospital they’ve actually developed symptoms, again at this juncture it would be hard to say whether they picked them up at home or whether they may have picked them up from another person in the hospital, all our staff wear full PPE so it’s unlikely that there would be staff transmission to patients but it can happen and it has happened in some of the Dublin hospitals”.
She added that the high numbers in the hospital are because of the high numbers in the community and the increase hasn’t been as big among staff, noting “Despite our patient numbers having increased our actual numbers of staff out have only slightly increased and I suppose this is due to the very good wearing of protective equipment, we have no problems in relation for PPE for staff, we also do staff surveillance swabbing because we’re in a healthcare environment and very similar to nursing homes we are doing regular testing when we have higher numbers”.
There were 17 patients waiting for beds yesterday at the local A&E and the local hospital is warning there are delays in the ED so management is asking people to not go unless absolutely necessary.
General Manager Anne Slattery says you should always contact your doctor first, commenting “If anyone is feeling unwell they should contact their GP or Caredoc if they think that they have symptoms or that they are unwell and then the doctor will make a decision as to whether or not they need to attend the emergency department, having said that in an emergency and where someone is really unwell people have to come to hospital and we do have separate streams in the emergency department where people that have Covid symptoms are kept separate to those that don’t”.
