Dr Mukesh Haikerwal has taken to swabbing patients for COVID-19 in their cars amid fears GPs are ill-equipped to deal with a potential coronavirus outbreak.Credit:Jason South
Sydney GP Kerryn Phelps has called for medical practitioners to be fast-tracked for coronavirus testing,after a fellow GP was told she would have to wait five days to be tested after developing cold symptoms. It can take another five days to receive the pathology results.
Doctors have been repeatedly told by federal and state government health authorities not to go to work if they have any symptoms that could be signs of COVID-19.
But when many have tried to get tested to protect their patients they were fobbed off because they didn’t meet the threshold for testing because they had not recently travelled overseas and were not close contacts of confirmed cases.
“My hospital can’t afford to have us all out of work for the rest of the week as I call around trying to get tested,then if I do manage to – which is looking highly unlikely at this stage – wait however many days for the results to come back,” one doctor told theHerald andThe Age on condition of anonymity.
Healthcare workers are bracing for a deluge of people seeking coronavirus testing following Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt’s directive that unwell healthcare workers and others who may have had contact with virus carriers or been in a high-risk area get themselves tested.
RPA has moved its coronavirus clinics to a larger area to cater for the influx of patients and the government’s health advice hotline Healthdirect was knocked offline several times on Monday morning due to spikes in calls.