HA reviews patient isolation workflow

March 29, 2021

(To watch the full press briefing with sign language interpretation, click here.)

 

The Hospital Authority today said it is reviewing the workflow for handling imported COVID-19 cases in the North Lantau Hospital Hong Kong Infection Control Centre.

 

A 45-year-old woman who is an imported case was admitted to the infection control centre on March 26. She was arranged to stay in a cubicle with four other COVID-19 patients for about 20 minutes.

 

She was then transferred to another cubicle for isolation after being confirmed to be infected with the new virus variant.

 

Hospital Authority Chief Manager (Clinical Effectiveness & Technology Management) Dr Linda Yu said the authority had explained the incident to the patients concerned and apologised to them.

 

"According to the procedural guidelines, we usually need to separate the patient in a single room to wait for the confirmation of the COVID-19 test, and also wait for the sequencing results so that we know whether they have the mutated strain.

 

"For this case, we knew that the case was an imported one, so we needed to arrange her in a single room.

 

"But during the process there may have been some miscommunication and we are now reviewing the whole workflow for handling imported cases to prevent this from happening again."

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