No clean sheets: PPE lapse
Disabled pensioner tells of awful time without home help during lockdown
Joan Northcott went without clean sheets or vacuumed floors for almost three months over the peak of the Covid-19 crisis.
Luckily, the 80-year-old had meals in the freezer, but often turned to just a bit of toast for dinner.
“It was awful, absolutely dreadful. I hadn’t had my sheets changed, the place hadn’t been vacuumed, the shower, basin and toilet hadn’t been cleaned and the floor needed washing because I’m fairly shaky on it and tend to spill things.
“It was really, really hard.” Northcott has a bad back and has a walker to get around her Ngatea home in the Waikato. She gets pain lifting her arms so her home support worker comes once a week to help with cooking and cleaning.
But over lockdown, the pensioner was on her own. Her daughters were not allowed to visit out of fear they would infect her with the deadly virus.
Disability Rights Commissioner Paula Tesoriero said many others would have also gone without help because the sector wasn’t given enough Personal Protective Equipment so some workers had to stop home visits during lockdown.
Tesoriero said even before alert level 4, community workers struggled to access PPE to visit people often with high-needs and vulnerabilities.
This week’s Auditor General’s report into the management of PPE and the national reserve highlighted issues the disability sector already knew, Tesoriero said.
It found the Ministry of Health didn’t factor into its demand modelling the needs of frontline healthcare workers outside of hospitals.
And community-based health and disability providers struggled to get PPE because at the start of the crisis district health boards did not “uniformly understand” they were responsible for distributing it to them.
On March 31, director general of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield said staff needed to “feel safe as well as be safe”, that the ministry had instructed DHBs to provide PPE to the wider health and disability sector and masks would be released from the national reserve.
The Auditor General’s report said this led to “mixed messages”, confusion and a rush on demand.
Other holes identified were that as there’d not been a stocktake of PPE since 2016, the ministry and DHBs didn’t know how much had expired or how much was needed.
Among its recommendations was that emergency plans were kept up to date and tested regularly, that demand forecasting is updated as clinical guidelines are changed, how healthcare workers outside of hospitals are catered for, a centralised system for the national reserve with periodic stock takes and more detailed distribution plans.
Tesoriero said she welcomed the report and hoped the recommendations would be reviewed urgently and implemented as quickly as possible.