RAYMOND Terrace Family Practice will be delivering a community respiratory clinic from their rooms at 4 Jacaranda Avenue.

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General Practitioner Dr Damien Wellborne, one of the doctors practicing from the clinic explains how the respiratory clinic will work to detect COVID-19 within our community.

Patients that have been identified as needing a COVID-19 test will be invited to attend the clinic by appointment.

“Patients should arrive by car where possible, we have arrange to have some parking immediately outside our facility, when the patients’ appointment time arrives they come to the parking spot, and we have a room that we can see them from communicate with them and the flow from there would be that we will phone the patient and collect their data for the demographics and admin side of things.

“Then the Doctor will talk to the patient, find out how they are travelling, what their symptoms have been, check them against the criteria for an assessment.”

It is only after this has been completed that the patient will be invited to enter the facility through a dedicated rear entrance located off Swan Street where they will enter rooms designated for potential COVID-19 patients.

“These rooms have been made safe for the patients with negative pressure and isolation so they can be assured that they are not coming into a place that’s riddled with Coronavirus as well,” Dr Wellborne said.

They will be greeted by a staff member wearing PPE and will be asked to use hand sanitiser and to don a mask, then they will be escorted into the isolation room.

Within the isolation room the doctor will make an assessment of the patients health, by taking temperatures, oxygen saturation levels, and possibly listening to their chest and taking the patients’ blood pressure.

If the doctor determines that a COVID-19 test is required the swabs will be taken in the isolation room.

Importantly the patient will be given advice as to what action to take in response to either a positive or negative result to the COVID-19 test.

The results will be given to the patient and their regular doctor by the community respiratory clinic.

By Marian SAMPSON