Coronavirus: Box Hill Medical Centre doctor quits over lack of protection
A doctor has resigned after she was expected to see patients who thought they had the coronavirus without a mask. Now the Box Hill medical centre has hit back, saying it is taking the right health precautions.
East
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A GP says she has quit working at an eastern suburbs medical centre because of its poor efforts to protect staff and patients from exposure to the coronavirus.
Mother-of-four Dr Debra Dettman-Wu said she felt “absolutely, completely unsafe” when she arrived to work at Box Hill Medical Centre this morning to find there wasn’t any protective equipment available.
She said the centre didn’t even have a copy of the updated state guidelines regarding the virus, nor had staff been given any direction from the centre about managing the virus.
“With rising numbers of coronavirus cases in the surrounding suburbs I decided I was no longer prepared to continue working in an unsafe environment,” she said.
The doctor of 15 years said she expected much more after the office she had been working out of for more than two years was last week turned into a quarantine room for patients who phoned the clinic, thinking they could have the virus.
“The problem with this is many patients with symptoms don’t phone ahead,” she said.
Dr Dettman-Wu said she was then booked to see three patients today who wanted to be tested for coronavirus, despite requesting last week that she not see patients with respiratory symptoms because of her asthma.
“All three made it into my office without a mask and without being flagged in anyway,” she said.
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“I was then, with the unmasked patient coughing in my room, advised by the practice nurse that there were no surgical masks available at all.”
Dr Dettman-Wu said as a mother of young children, two with special needs, the risks to her family were too high to continue working at the clinic.
She said she was shocked at the centre’s lack of infection control measures considering a case of coronavirus had been confirmed just two suburbs away in Kew.
Dr Dettman-Wu told Whitehorse Leader she packed up her stuff this afternoon and left the clinic with no intention of returning, but had not yet submitted a formal resignation letter.
Box Hill Medical Centre’s Dr Conrad Chiu said the accusations against the clinic had been “unjustly made”.
He said masks were readily available for doctors and the clinic had a policy for staff to put on a mask and deal with any suspected COVID-19 cases in an isolation room.
But Dr Chiu said the centre did not have a policy “of injudiciously putting masks on all patients who enter our clinic” because of the mask shortage in Australia.
He said there was a copy of the government’s recommendations on every doctor’s desk, and doctors were receiving regular internal emails with updates from the government.