Mildura hospital on edge as state emergency declared

MILDURA Base Public Hospital is looking at ways to rapidly expand its ability to treat higher numbers of seriously ill COVID patients, as metropolitan and some regional hospitals move to an emergency status and put staff leave on hold.

The Victorian Government has declared a Code Brown emergency for all Melbourne hospitals and six in the regions, as the system feels the strain of high numbers of admissions and staff shortages caused by infections and close-contact isolation.

One of the affected regional hospitals is Bendigo Health, which has been the main source of pandemic patient-load support for Mildura.

The emergency status is effective from noon on Wednesday. It means some hospital staff may be recalled from leave and more emergency services can be deferred, and that individual hospitals can negotiate leave cancellations with staff where needed.

In Mildura, hospital chief executive Terry Welch confirmed that this region’s main public hospital had not been included in the Code Brown, but that it was still losing up to 20 staff a day to infection and contact isolation and had been balancing workloads and leave requests for months.

The hospital last week announced that it had been able to establish a dedicated COVID ward of eight beds, and two dedicated ICU beds. Asked by Sunraysia Daily whether more beds could be made available, Mr Welch said that “we are urgently reviewing that as we speak”.

Dedicated COVID wards require specific standards of air circulation and containment to keep the virus from spreading to other parts of the hospital and work is under way to achieve such measures beyond the rooms presently available, but this is expected to take at least six weeks to complete.

The government emergency declaration, more commonly used for incidents such as bushfires or other disasters and usually in place for only a few days, is expected to last from four to six weeks and is aimed at easing pressure on the system ahead of the expected peak of hospital cases.

As of Tuesday, there were more than 4000 health staff unavailable across the state after they tested positive for COVID-19 or were identified as close contacts.

Mildura received some relatively good news regarding case numbers on Tuesday, as new case numbers dropped to 52 from 87 the previous day. The number of active cases dropped from 902 to 769.

Victoria recorded 20,180 new COVID cases and 22 deaths on Tuesday, the nation’s deadliest day of the pandemic (a total of 77 fatalities), and 1152 patients were in hospital, although it was also the second consecutive day that Victorian case numbers decreased.

The total number of active cases in the state was 235,035 on Tuesday, a fall of about 10,000 cases since Monday.

Tuesday’s hospital patient numbers were a decrease of 77 on the previous day and the number of people in ICU dropped by two to 127, although 43 people were on ventilation, an increase of five.

Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton said on Monday that hospital admission numbers were yet to peak and might not for a month.

He said there was a lag of about two weeks between case numbers and hospital admissions, and three weeks for that to translate to ICU figures.

-with AAP