Ideas for dealing with the pending Covid19 surge.

randy hickey

I want this thread to be a place where people can put forward various ideas to help deal with the inevitable surge that our health service is going to experience.

Here's one of mine:

One of the biggest issues that will face us is the number of essential frontline healthcare workers that will be taken out of commission by the virus. If we are unlucky, even with staff returning from abroad, reactivated retirees, and redeployed staff from other healthcare departments, we will likely struggle to staff the number of ICU beds that are going to be needed.
My proposal would be to put a call out to all current Leaving Cert students who have applied to CAO to do a nursing/medicine degree to step forward, and be put through a crash course in the specific skills of monitoring ventilators etc.
Depending on how desperate things were getting, they could possibly even be trained to intubate.
Obviously, they should be rewarded in some way, maybe by giving them extra points towards their respective third level courses.

Anybody else got any ideas to deal with the oncoming storm?

hmmm

I'd like the option of moving to a fever hospital/quarantine. Preferably with a hospital for more serious cases not too far away.

I know a lot of people would be happier recovering at home, but it seems almost inevitable that we will see entire families come down with this illness if there is a sick person in the house. One of my biggest concerns would be a family member requiring a trip to hospital, and I'm basically out of action to assist.

Kerry25x

Unregistered leaving certificate students with no qualifications will never be intubating patients or even monitoring patients on ventilators, you wouldn't even get 3rd level nursing students doing that. Even just to have them doing basic tasks would be a nightmare in my opinion because supervising them would just slow the nursing staff down.

I like the idea of quarantine centers for people who don't need medical care.

Carol25

Some ideas that might help:
1. Bring in volunteers from other parts of the civil service to do menial jobs that so often take up doctors and nurses time between patients in a&e and hospitals - paperwork, charts, records, etc.
2. Try and start disinfecting large areas where known outbreaks are occurring. I haven’t seen this happening in Ireland to date at all, public transport, streets, apartment blocks, shopping centres, they could all be harbouring the virus currently.
3. Try and come up with another approach for over 70s and vulnerable groups. ‘Cocooning’ sounds like they’re a baby in a womb and many of this section of society won’t take kindly to this label. Offer real alternatives, someone set up an online community, or daily tv programme for this group to ring in to discussing their difficulties. I think this group should also be allowed a daily walk close to their house. It will help them cope. Being a voiceless cocooned group won’t work long term.
4. Give regular postings and updates to all doctors and nurses throughout Ireland re developments with the virus, what treatment is helping, what isn’t. I’m also noticing a distinct lack of information online about when to go to a hospital with Covid, how long it takes for symptoms or a cough to develop and other information. Perhaps some patients are leaving it too late to seek medical care?
5. Does Ireland give any credit to the reports that hydro chloroquine combined with azithromycin has had some success? Is it something we should be looking at?
6. Have a clear plan on where to deploy the extra doctors and nurses that are bravely putting themselves forward to fight this disease so that resources will be deployed in a manageable way. A lot of the medics in Italy are exhausted which would weaken their immune response to the virus.
7. There are a lot of new primary care centres with empty hospital beds in them, how many approximately are there, why are they not all opened and staffed for the duration of this crisis, either as Covid wards or for other medical procedures needing attention during this time.

fryup

open hotels, sports pavilions and the like as make-shift hospitals

randy hickey

randy hickey wrote: »

I want this thread to be a place where people can put forward various ideas to help deal with the inevitable surge that our health service is going to experience.

Here's one of mine:

One of the biggest issues that will face us is the number of essential frontline healthcare workers that will be taken out of commission by the virus. If we are unlucky, even with staff returning from abroad, reactivated retirees, and redeployed staff from other healthcare departments, we will likely struggle to staff the number of ICU beds that are going to be needed.
My proposal would be to put a call out to all current Leaving Cert students who have applied to CAO to do a nursing/medicine degree to step forward, and be put through a crash course in the specific skills of monitoring ventilators etc.
Depending on how desperate things were getting, they could possibly even be trained to intubate.
Obviously, they should be rewarded in some way, maybe by giving them extra points towards their respective third level courses.

Anybody else got any ideas to deal with the oncoming storm?

Are you smoking crack? Could we not get trained medical staff to up train to do ICU stuff like intubate patients and then get potential students to do basic stuff like take a temperature etc? Could you imagine the average leaving cert student with that responsibility? It'd be carnage

randy hickey

Deleted User wrote: »

Are you smoking crack? Could we not get trained medical staff to up train to do ICU stuff like intubate patients and then get potential students to do basic stuff like take a temperature etc? Could you imagine the average leaving cert student with that responsibility? It'd be carnage

My primary aim here is to stimulate a conversation that I haven't seen anywhere else.
I would hope that people could throw their ideas onto this thread without being inhibited by fear of being ripped to pieces by other posters.
Ideas that wouldn't in normal circumstances see the light of day.These are not normal circumstances.

Cupatae

randy hickey wrote: »

I want this thread to be a place where people can put forward various ideas to help deal with the inevitable surge that our health service is going to experience.

Here's one of mine:

One of the biggest issues that will face us is the number of essential frontline healthcare workers that will be taken out of commission by the virus. If we are unlucky, even with staff returning from abroad, reactivated retirees, and redeployed staff from other healthcare departments, we will likely struggle to staff the number of ICU beds that are going to be needed.
My proposal would be to put a call out to all current Leaving Cert students who have applied to CAO to do a nursing/medicine degree to step forward, and be put through a crash course in the specific skills of monitoring ventilators etc.
Depending on how desperate things were getting, they could possibly even be trained to intubate.
Obviously, they should be rewarded in some way, maybe by giving them extra points towards their respective third level courses.

Anybody else got any ideas to deal with the oncoming storm?

Take some of the best staff and have them train up volunteers, just teach em the essentials strip away anything not nessesary, then pair those volunteers with experienced members so if they get stuck they have a reference point and nothing can go too crazy wrong...

Obviously not ideal...but better than nothing i think anyway.

Def not leaving certs... tho or anyone that age...

Charles Babbage

hmmm wrote: »

I'd like the option of moving to a fever hospital/quarantine. Preferably with a hospital for more serious cases not too far away.

I know a lot of people would be happier recovering at home, but it seems almost inevitable that we will see entire families come down with this illness if there is a sick person in the house. One of my biggest concerns would be a family member requiring a trip to hospital, and I'm basically out of action to assist.

This is already planned, where hotels will be used as isolation centres for people not requiring hospitalisation who normally live with other people not infected. They could have someone medical at such sites to see if anyone there did need moved to hospital.

Hotels are readily available, all that is needed is training in food delivery, cleaning etc.