Hundreds of Queensland Health staff ordered into quarantine

Chief health officer Jeannette Young has taken the extraordinary step of pulling a heart surgeon out of quarantine to save a baby’s life, with more than 400 of the state’s frontline healthcare workers now in isolation.

A Brisbane heart surgeon has been allowed out of quarantine to perform a lifesaving operation on a baby at Queensland Children’s Hospital.

It comes as as the southeast’s Delta crisis hits the state’s healthcare system hard.

More than 400 healthcare workers have been forced into home quarantine due to links with the growing number of Covid exposure sites – including schools.

The surgeon had to receive a special exemption from chief health officer Jeannette Young to operate on the newborn, who was delivered at the Mater Mothers’ Hospital with hypoplastic left heart syndrome. Babies born with the condition have only half a functioning heart and without surgery, they will die.

Dr Young said with every one of Queensland’s paediatric cardiac surgeons in quarantine, she had to give special permission to allow one of the specialists to leave home to operate on a sick child.

“We worked through how we could allow one of them to go and operate on an urgent case,” Dr Young said.

“We will do that every single time. No Queenslander will be denied any care because the health workers they need are in quarantine.”

It’s the first time during the 18-month pandemic that a heart surgeon has had to leave quarantine to operate at the children’s hospital.

The doctor completed what is dubbed the Norwood procedure on the baby – highly complex open-heart surgery performed as the first of three operations to treat the syndrome. Babies undergoing the high-risk operation are put on a heart-lung machine and the surgeon cuts through the breast bone to access the heart.

Chief health officer Dr Jeannette Young. Picture: Brad Fleet

The intricate surgery is designed to allow the heart’s right ventricle to take over the work of the left chamber, which is ­severely underdeveloped.

The Norwood procedure is so highly complex only limited numbers of doctors worldwide have enough training to be able to carry out the surgery.

Dr Young granted the surgeon an exemption to leave quarantine under strict conditions, including that he was fully vaccinated. He wore full personal protective equipment while at the hospital and has agreed to daily Covid testing.

Infectious disease physician Paul Griffin said it was unlikely the doctor would have posed any risk exiting quarantine.

“I think the actual risk from what’s been done here is not significant and clearly was the right thing to do without any cause for concern,” he said.

Dr Young said “well over 400 of our health workers” had been required to go into quarantine as a result of the state’s escalating Delta variant outbreak, which has been spreading through Brisbane schools and has grown to 47 cases, with 16 new locally acquired infections reported on Tuesday.

“Unfortunately, we have had to delay some surgery and some outpatient work to manage that,” she said.

She said it was not possible to rotate health staff from the regions into the state’s heavily populated southeast corner to compensate.

“The regions are already struggling,” Dr Young said.

She said although most of Queensland’s health workforce had received their Covid-19 shots, they still needed to quarantine if they had been to an exposure site and potentially had contact with an infected case.

“We know that although you’ve been vaccinated you can still pass it on,” Dr Young said.

“This is too critical. We cannot have health workers going to a hospital who can potentially pass on the virus because then we risk that entire hospital, as we saw a few months ago.”

There are fears there aren’t enough health staff, as many workers are forced into isolation.

Dr Young last night said health workforce numbers were being destroyed because many workers had children who attended the six impacted schools now listed as exposure sites.

“Now those health workers are in quarantine with their children – they’re not at work,” Dr Young said.

“I need that to happen because I cannot have those health workers going into the workplace and spreading the virus. We are doing the work now to look at the impact of all of that health workforce being at home.”

Dr Young said Health Department director-general John Wakefield had spoken with hospitals to determine what critical work needed to continue and what could be delayed.

“Hopefully they’re (the impacted health workers) only at home for 14 days and then we can get back and we can ramp up elective surgery and out patients again,” she said.

Indooroopilly State High School, Ironside State School, Brisbane Grammar School, Brisbane Girls’ Grammar School and St Peters Lutheran College at Indooroopilly have all been caught up in the latest cluster.

The Courier-Mail understands that as of 2pm on Monday, there were over 7200 people in Queensland subject to a quarantine direction order, including about 3400 who were in home quarantine.

Dr Young stressed that those in home quarantine must not leave their home unless they are getting a test or it is an “absolute dire emergency”.

“If it isn’t a dire emergency and you have got an issue, please ring 134 COVID … and we will help sort out whatever your issue is,” Dr Young said.

“Don’t leave home. We know that the Delta variant of the virus is totally unforgiving.”

Officials are ramping up the number of staff available to support those people forced into home quarantine.

Dr Young suggested people in the locked down region use online shopping as she implored people to stay at home and to wear a mask when they go outside.