I've just had a hospital appointment cancelled due to the consultant I was going to see needing to self isolate and it got me thinking about how contact tracing and self-isolation works for hospital staff. Does anyone know?
I'm assuming that if someone working in an ophthalmology department (my example) is identified as having been in sufficiently close contact with a confirmed positive person they need to self isolate until they test negative (twice?) and that vaccination status can't exclude them from that requirement since it cannot be assumed that vaccination is 100% effective. I can also see how a consultant particularly in an ophthalmology department might well end up in such a situation. I was not asked to test negative or self-isolate for a few days before my now-cancelled appointment this Thursday and would presumably have spent a lot of time in quite close and lengthy face-to-face contact with the consultant as he examined my eyes so, unless the consultant was wearing a very high level of PPE, that would presumably have been a traceable event had I subsequently discovered that I was infected at the time.
How does contact tracing work for someone working on a Covid-19 ward though? On a Covid-19 ward pretty much by definition the staff there are constantly in contact with confirmed positive cases. Is it assumed that their PPE is sufficiently strong such that contacts when in PPE don't count but if they were unlucky enough to have been in a rule-of-6 table at a pub with an infected person in the group they would be subject to the same contact tracing self-isolation requirements as the rest of us?
Or is it the case that pretty much all in-hospital contacts across all departments are excluded from contact tracing if PPE was in place on the basis that the PPE would have provided protection? If that is the case then is everyone in a hospital environment wearing really high level PPE? I'm assuming that isn't the case and that there is some sort of two-tier system where contact in a red-zone ward doesn't count due to a much higher level of PPE whereas contact during an eye exam does count?
I'm really hoping that my consultant is self-isolating purely on the basis of having been contact traced and that he will soon pass his negative testing requirement thanks to his PPE and/or vaccination status and will be able to get back to work and reschedule his list quite quickly otherwise I might have to think about self-funding a private consultation and then presumably whatever operation(s) are required afterwards.
There must be an awful lot of these frustrations ongoing at the moment. I do worry how long it is going to take the NHS to recover from this. The government really will have its work cut out for it over the coming years.
- Julian
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Contact tracing and self-isolation for hospital staff?
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