Incidental finding of COVID-19 infection amongst staff at a primary care facility in Ghana

African Journal of Primary Health Care & Family Medicine

 
 
Field Value
 
Title Incidental finding of COVID-19 infection amongst staff at a primary care facility in Ghana
 
Creator Vandyck-Sey, Priscilla Amoh, Gordon Essuman, Akye Lawson, Henry
 
Subject — COVID-19 infection; healthcare worker; staff; Ghana; incidental finding; modified PPE
Description The COVID-19 pandemic has affected nearly every country worldwide and all African countries. The issue of healthcare workers (HCWs) contracting the disease is a growing concern in Ghana, because of the risk of spreading infections amongst themselves and to vulnerable patients in their care. This article illustrates how 14 staff at the Korle Bu Polyclinic/Family Medicine Department were incidentally found to be Covid-19 positive with most of them being asymptomatic. This observation led to a modification of the personal protective equipment (PPE) used by clinical staff when attending to patients. Furthermore, this finding suggests that a different criteria or guideline may be needed for testing of HCWs during a pandemic where a significant proportion of infected people are asymptomatic. We conclude that in the primary care setting HCWs must be ready to see all the following cases safely: routine patients, asymptomatic COVID-19 patients and suspected COVID-19 patients.
 
Publisher AOSIS
 
Contributor
Date 2020-10-09
 
Type info:eu-repo/semantics/article info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion — Report of medical event/incident/occurrence
Format text/html application/epub+zip text/xml application/pdf
Identifier 10.4102/phcfm.v12i1.2669
 
Source African Journal of Primary Health Care & Family Medicine; Vol 12, No 1 (2020); 4 pages 2071-2936 2071-2928
 
Language eng
 
Relation
The following web links (URLs) may trigger a file download or direct you to an alternative webpage to gain access to a publication file format of the published article:

https://phcfm.org/index.php/phcfm/article/view/2669/4284 https://phcfm.org/index.php/phcfm/article/view/2669/4283 https://phcfm.org/index.php/phcfm/article/view/2669/4285 https://phcfm.org/index.php/phcfm/article/view/2669/4282
 
Coverage Ghana; West Africa; Africa — —
Rights Copyright (c) 2020 Priscilla Vandyck-Sey, Gordon Amoh, Akye Essuman, Henry Lawson https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
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