"Poor staff treatment"

A few days ago, my infant child had a high fever, no coughing runny nose or other symptoms which I believe are conducive of COVID-19. As a result, we had to remove them from daycare and source a medical clearance before my child can return. A few days later in the afternoon, I had an appointment call with my GP at our local medical centre. Due to high fever being one of the COVID-19 symptoms my GP could not give me the certificate.

They directed us to attend the clinic at Joondalup Health Campus for COVID-19 to be tested, which I believe falls in line with the current health guidelines.

As we live a fair distance away from the health campus we were faced with a half-hour drive, which normally wouldn’t be an issue but when we arrived at the COVID-19 department I felt an arrogant staff member bluntly asked what were my child's symptoms, with little to no greeting. I explained as above that my child had previously had a high fever and our GP directed us to the hospital. The staff member said immediately no, we can’t test your child as they doesn’t have symptoms. I said how am I suppose to come back to work the next day? I felt they rudely answered, you will have to stay at home.

As a result, we were forced to refer back to our GP, who quite rightly, was surprised and confused at our experience as in my opinion, they are following the WA health guidelines. They have now had to give us a referral for Western diagnostic for which we will have to drive to another location. 

Our experience has left us jaded of the health campus and the service it provides: 

1. I feel your staff have no manners, we are in a pandemic but I would expect that your staff on the front line would be selected to deal with situations both pragmatically and with a degree of humanity in any case. 

2. Now I will probably have to wait another 24h or more and take an extra day off from work, due to the time lost between that day and the next day’s test.

I am very aware that the current times have front line personnel working extremely long hours with a high degree of stress. But as the saying goes; “we are all in it together”, although in my opinion, it would appear that some of the Joondalup hospital staff are not.