AIBU to refuse to be held prisoner at work?

[KitKat1985]

www.theargus.co.uk/news/18227689.fresh-suspected-coronavirus-case-nurses-mill-view-hospital-held-quarantine/?fbclid=IwAR3IShE3kLzzULNr8qVGu-31Bxf_n4YbOVlDL1mXfm6CgQAdK1-XtTXRFCo

I'm a nurse in this Trust. The nurses involved have apparently been refused the right to leave the building and have bee there since yesterday because they treated a patient with suspected coronavirus. This in my opinion is complete overkill and they are essentially holding the staff like prisoners. Even if they were unlucky enough to get coronavirus, they won't immediately get ill and be contagious anyway, so why not just let them go home (maybe with facemasks etc on) and quarantine them there?! There's no way anyone is keeping me from going home from work.

@KitKat1985 it doesn’t make any sense. The current PHE advice is to encourage well but infected patients to stay at home and self quarantine. These nurses are not even infected! But honestly you’re wasting your breath on here as reasoning doesn’t work with health paranoia types.

I can answer part of it from personal experience. Unrelated others, teachers, nursery nurses, neighbours, etc will stand up, some asked, some paid, others not.

Sounds fair enough but it's still not unreasonable for people to worry that in the event of quarantine theyre having to rely on strangers stepping up to care for children.
I just think it's very flippant to say tough shit youre in quarantine now but dont worry back when SARS was a thing my neighbour watched my kids. People panic when they lack information... if a quarantine seems like a likely prospect then the powers that be would do well to share some information on the practicalities of the quarantine rather than people just been told not to worry by random internet commentators.

I just think it's very flippant to say tough shit youre in quarantine now but dont worry back when SARS was a thing my neighbour watched my kids. How is that flippant ? It's an exampe of what can happen, did hapen in a very similar case!

People panic when social media and crap journos insist on posting outlandish whataboutery.

If random internet commentators like myself can post from experience and dispel even a little o that then all to the good, surely!

As for 'the powers that be' there is a lot of information in general... not specifically, but in general! You just have to take it at face value and refuse to be hyped into fear!

YANBU OP

Asymptomatic but possible contact with infected patient should mean self-isolation for 14 days or until test results come back negative, whichever is soonest.

There must be many other people in prolonged contact with the original source. What's happening to the people who sat next to her on the plane journey, the people who served meals to her on the plane journey and removed her used items which could easily have been contaminated.
How did she get away from the airport taxi or public transport, again possible prolonged contact.
How did she get virus confirmed after sitting in waiting room at hospital or doctors surgery.
It's a minefield and if nurses are to be isolated there's probably many more people who have a similar or higher risk of infection.

And for the record all the suspected cases we have had have turned out to be people with normal flu....
Oh and the one person who thought he had it because he'd had a Chinese takeaway the night before

- no 1358 have been tested, 8 has been tested positive with Coronavirus (as of yesterday anyway)

Sorry that should say in the UK

It seems that those with a low risk of exposure have been allowed to self isolate, while those who are a high risk are being forcibly quarantined. The nurses who have been quarantined are high risk because they treated a suspected victim who had just flown back from Hong Kong. So they’re not making a difference between how they quarantine nurses vs everyone else. They’re making a difference between how they quarantine high risk vs low risk people.

This

There seems to be a complete lack of understanding about high risk v low risk.

But then that's something that's very common. Even doctors who deal in explaining risk every day to patients have been studied and a worrying number found that they don't understand how risk is expressed in various different forms.

How risk is expressed is a major point of discussion because people respond to the same risk if explained in a different way even if the risk is exactly the same.

Surely you know this sort of thing is one day a possibility becoming a nurse?

I live in Brighton & it's people like you who are making me scared OP. The measures are to stop it becoming a pandemic & I wouldn't trust most people to 'self-quarantine' & not go out.

If the New Scientist figures are correct then we would expect almost 400,000 deaths in the UK from NCOVID. Flu kills between 600 and in a bad year over 10,000 deaths in the UK.
Those figures are orders of magnitude apart.

The procedures in place are to try and prevent a pandemic, or at least slow it down enough that it can be coped with better.

If I thought I'd been exposed, I'm not so sure I'd want to go home and expose my family in turn.

It is not particularly worse than flu AT THE MOMENT. But apparently has a very high chance of mutating into something a lot worse if it becomes prevalent. You are being fucking selfish and stupid.

I've just read the regs (I'm familiar with the Civil Contingencies Act and regs made under it) and as expected, there's provision (section 7.6)for people potentially being quarantined to make representations, ie argue for an exception to be made, usually on the grounds of someone's welfare.

So I'd advise OP to ask what the procedure would be to ensure suitable care for her children if her hospital got locked down. I suspect it would involve some phone calls to PHE, a hastily-written licence to permit OP to be transported in the back of a black cab to her home and then requiring her to stay there and family to stay away from crowds, and various conditions on disinfection, but couldn't say for sure.

There's also the right to appeal the quarantine decision, to the magistrates Court, but that would take longer.

My non-professional advice to OP is to ensure managers in her hospital are aware she is a carer, find out how they would operate exemptions to quarantine, and also prepare her kids and childcare staff for a possibility of some hours before they could get reunited.

PHE epidemiologists and contingency Planners aren't daft and are well aware carers exist.

Just to update briefly, the nurses in question have apparently been sent home and told to self-isolate, (so exactly what I suggested might be more sensible than detaining people at work). So clearly Public Health England agree that it's a far better alternative than quarantining people at their place of employment. But thanks to everyone for the abuse and being told I was stupid and selfish for even suggesting such a thing.

www.theargus.co.uk/news/18229245.nurses-quarantine-mill-view-hospital/

Very informative and helpful post jackparlabane,.

Doubt they’ll come back and apologise KitKat. Some posters just like being nasty.

The man mopping the floor in the Brighton G’s surgery, which has apparently reopened, was laughable. Deep cleaning my arse. Did they disinfect every item on those shelves?

I thought exactly the same. We completely clear out a room before a potentially or actually infectious patient arrives, then deep clean via a wipe of every flat surface, afterwards.

KitKat Very glad to see sense has prevailed.

I'm not a nurse but found myself bristling at some of the nasty posts on here, challenging whether you were a nurse etc because a nurse would never think of doing anything that didn't have her supplicant before the Mighty Public!...

I'm also sick to death of the ridiculous 'standards' people hold HCP staff to- except when it comes to pay, of course.

Oh, and the 'false alarms', people coming to Emergency with a cold, shrieking Coronavirus!!- which they're blaming last night's Chinese takeaway for. When the advice is do not go to your GP or Emergency; call 111.

Sadly, I doubt you'll get any apologies.

What a ridiculous post, Miljea

I doubt I'll get any apologies either. But it's always so warming to know what the general public really think of us nurses. Honestly I could cry right now about being abused on here and called selfish just for suggesting I was worried about being away from my children, especially my eldest daughter with autism who would be massively distressed by my not being there. I mean how selfish right?!

Don't let it get you down KitKat1985. Nurses and other HCPs go the extra mile every day. There has to be a limit on the expectation or else there might be a recruitment and retention crisis in the health service...another horse which has well and truly bolted.

Well, I won't be aplogising, as I didn't say anything to apologise for!

And I still can't get exorcised over a Trust making a holding decision (literally) whilst discussing the correct procedure with PHE. Which is presumably what happened, given the events that actually did take place!

Some of the posts were awful Curious, I haven’t checked back on your posts but I don’t recall them being nasty.

Your right Miljea on every single point you made at 16.01.

74NewStreet Barbarella doesn't think so

For the YABUs, what happens to those of us who have had to visit hospital appointments for routine things where half the patients around us are clearly ill and sputtering and sniffling they might have the virus- it certainly occurred to me, we could all be affected, what should we do?