Meanwhile, I have been fact checking yesterday's @VicGovDHHS statement, because there were some - tensions - between what I was being told by residents and their advocates, and what was said in the statement. First, availability of medication...
the @VicGovDHHS statement said @cohealth_au was providing. Community advocates said while things were much improved, there were still problems. So who is right? Here is what seems to be going on, based on an interview this morning with a @cohealth_au spokesperson
.@cohealth_au is indeed providing, and has been since the early days of the lockdown, though as we all know in those first few days there were a lot of problems with getting things into the flats, but ...
..problems emerged, and still present, with the @VicGovDHHS hotline. Residents requesting medical help were often forced to wait a very long time to get through. So @cohealth_au established its own hotline. (9448 5551)
Added to this, there are some things that residents regard as medical needs, such as vitamin tablets for example, that @cohealth_au does not provide.
..and very naturally some people are trying to make their own arrangements, asking relatives to pick up meds for them, and these are then delivered to the site, including by people contacting the community advocates as intermediaries.
.@cohealth_au cannot include these in its service, because they can't guarantee they are what they say they are, and that they have been appropriately prescribed. (yet, of course, if I were in quarantine I would probably be getting my daughter to pick up stuff for me and it
would be nobody else's business. One of the ways quarantine in #33alfred and the other public housing estates IS different from quarantine in other homes. Similar as the issues that have arisen about alcohol deliveries)
The community advocates have to negotiate the meds they are trying to deliver through the system. While improved communications means this is mostly working, there can still be delays and frustrations and it is more labor intensive than it should be.
As well, not all the residents know the @cohealth_au hotline. Consideration is being given to displaying it on a banner outside #33Alfred . That hotline again: 9448 5551
So @cohealth_au is working with the community advocates to develop a protocol and some better methods. Vitamin pills can go up with food, they think.
Meanwhile @cohealth_au thinks @youthconnect01 and the other community volunteers are wonderful. But also concerns about sustainability of effort by volunteers, and efforts are underway to find a way to make a community led public health effort sustainable.
As well, very naturally,
