Health ministry satisfied with isolated areas at chest hospital, NMIA
Published:Saturday | February 1, 2020 | 12:08 AMAndre Williams/Staff Reporter
The quarantine locations at the National Chest Hospital and the Norman Manley International Airport (NMIA) are ready and satisfactory, Health and Wellness Minister Christopher Tufton said Thursday during a tour of both facilities along with technocrats.
The areas have been prepared in the event the deadly coronavirus enters the country.
Senior Medical Officer, National Chest Hospital, Terry Baker, said the hospital is equipped with the capacity and necessary sanitation.
“We have our personal protective equipment. We have it here so we don’t have to rush down to the storeroom, the main stores to bring it up here,” Baker said.
“In managing persons that need to be isolated it does require personal protective equipment so we have specialised mask, face shields and impermeable gowns, and so these will be in here for the staff required to take care of the patients.”
The isolation area can house up to two persons at a time, The Gleaner understands.
At the NMIA, Tufton said the border-protection workers were equipped and that a three-room, six-bed quarantine zone was in place there,
Public health and quarantine nurse Deborah Udo Udo said the airport has the basic items to deal with the inspection and interrogation of a patient.
INSPECTION PROCEDURE
“When we pull passengers out the line we bring them into this office. We do a recheck of the body temperature using the fever scan. We then call the doctors on duty at KSA and advise them on what to do,” Udo Udo said.
The nurse told The Gleaner that the airport is now equipped with four new thermometers to replace the two that were previously malfunctioning, along with a thermal scanner at both airports to check the temperatures of all arriving passengers.
“Clearly, we have our challenges so we are not trying to create an impression that we have the perfect environment, but what we should not do is give the impression that we are unprepared.
“Our public health nurses or doctors have experience in dealing with these issues, whether it was the SARS, whether it is communicable diseases like malaria and yellow fever, our airport facilities, our border protection units are in place,” Tufton said.
The minister said the real challenge now becomes identifying as accurately as possible the persons who are at risk.
The World Health Organization (WHO) on Thursday declared the outbreak of the coronavirus as a global emergency after the number of cases spiked tenfold in a week and has been exported to more than a dozen countries.
The WHO said it fears the impact the virus may have on countries that do not possess a strong healthcare system.