Caring for staff in COVID-19

In spite of the island doing well in managing the viral infection, Barbadians went into the COVID-19 pandemic with a mostly questionable health status.

Nonetheless, physician Dr Kenneth Connell has advised that employees should not automatically qualify to work from home. He likened COVID-19 to ‘a health ecology stress test’ and described the sudden onrush of the virus to residents being placed on a treadmill for the first time and being hooked up to machines so a doctor could examine the patient’s heart health as part of that stress test.

“We haven’t been the most fit participants on the treadmill. We got on the treadmill with our NCD burdens – hypertension, diabetes, all these things. So, we struggled onto the treadmill, barely holding on,” he said recently.

Continuing with the treadmill analogy he said that the exercise machine was set at high speed, “then we said wait, hang-on, this pandemic is knocking off people who are at very high risk. Why are we at high risk?”

The Clinical Pharmacologist said that the high risk to Barbadians is “because of the social determinants of health in the Caribbean and because hypertension is such a major driver for this”.

“As a population, we were not the healthiest NCD persons going on the treadmill.”

Dr Connell spoke of general Barbadian poor health at a UWI Centre for Professional Development and Lifelong Learning panel discussion involving the Barbados Employers Confederation (BEC) looking at ‘Workplace, Health & Wellness, Open for Business During COVID-19’ before an in-building and Facebook audience.

Other panellists were business administrator Sheena Mayers-Granville and Lecturer in Public Health and Epidemiology, Dr Heather Harewood.

Notwithstanding the recognition of Barbados’ high NCD rate, the University of the West Indies lecturer and Chairman of the Campus Health and Wellness Committee does not believe this should routinely translate to permission to work remotely.

“We cannot afford, as a medical fraternity, to automatically determine because someone has a NCD and is at a higher risk that automatically means they work from home.”

He added, “Even if you have hypertension, that in itself does not make you automatically stay home. It means you have to consider controlling your blood pressure more carefully, along with all the additional measures.”

The doctor’s advice to employers is, “Don’t just accept the note, ‘oh I have sugar so I can’t come in to work – ever’. That’s not going to work. You have to say to your employees, ‘you need to have a risk-assessment.”

He also said employers should challenge the community of health professionals, “not just the individual doctor, the health care fraternity to give clear, reasonable instructions on how they might mitigate the risk to that [NCD afflicted] employee at work and it cannot be just work from home”.

“What the employer should consider is what measures should be put at work… so that you can attend work, but we can mitigate your risk.”

He said measures could include provision of an individual office, isolated from other staff. “Maybe you might have to wear a surgical mask as opposed to cloth covering because of your risk. Maybe we might have to have shorter working hours at work, but not at home.”

Additionally, he said the workplace must have a structure and policy: “Your policy should be that all of your employees are trained in workplace health and wellness.”

Dr Connell said Barbadians must embrace the ‘new health landscape’ because “the world pre-covid will never be here again”.

“My vision now for Barbados, where we now must live with COVID-19, is how will we respond so that we can now mitigate constantly; open, close [borders], whatever must occur.”