Health turns to Skeleton Staff to hold the fort

By Lagi Keresoma

APIA, SAMOA – 27 MARCH 2022: To ensure that the health service is not disrupted by the increasing number of doctors and nurses infected with the COVID-19 virus, the Ministry of Health is keeping skeleton staff to ensure operations are going.

It is a major concern to the Acting Director of Health, Tagaloa Dr. Robert Thomsen and the Ministry of Health who are keeping the skeleton staff from selected personnel from various divisions of the Ministry while time is given for doctors and nurses to recover before resuming their duties.

The skeleton staff is the minimal number of people operating a unit during emergencies such as the current pandemic.

But other frontliners such as police and fire and emergency workers are also affected.

Tagaloa Dr. Robert Thomsen could not disclose the exact numbers of front liners affected but did say the number was high.

Health workers testing drivers in an effort to reduce crowds.

Recently a senior doctor noted the situation with the nurses working around the clock and that it was only a matter of time before the long hours would affect them.

The same concern was raised by the Deputy Police Commissioner Auapaau Logoitino Filipo when the number of affected police officers increased and changes were made to the police camping strategy.

All police on patrol and monitoring the checkpoints are now camped at the Petesa Hall at Mulinu’u while all positive officers are housed the police site at Fagali’i leaving the main headquarters clear as the operations center.

FESA & Police staff trained to do test
To relieve the medical team from additional work, the Fire & Emergency Service Authority (FESA) and the Ministry of Police have selected their own staff to train on how to conduct COVID-19 tests.

The FESA team is currently on call for the public who request testing and the police team focus is to test police officers on a daily basis.

Self-test & self –reporting
Tagaloa is promoting self-testing where people can do their own tests and report the result to the Ministry to help avoid people crowding together to avoid the virus spread.

The challenge is how to get people to report positive results.

“We are assessing a method to enforce reporting results, as we are aware that some people may not want to report their positive results,” said Tagaloa.,

There are more than 200,000 Rapid Antigen Test (RAT) kits being distributed to the district hospitals and private clinics, but if self-testing is given the green light, then more test kits would be needed quickly.