A large marquee set up outside the Sir Charles Gairdner emergency department is the first of many that will be erected to help WA hospitals cope with a surge in COVID cases.
All major hospitals in Perth are set to get similar structures ahead of the border reopening on February 5.
WA Health Minister Amber-Jade Sanderson revealed the measure yesterday amid growing pressure to release plans on how the health system will cope with coronavirus arriving in WA.
"We will be putting up marquees to start dealing with and practising our surge capacity and running staff through those plans," she said.
"You'll start to see that over the next few weeks."
The system is designed to try and keep COVID-positive patients separate from non-COVID patients but Ms Sanderson explained everybody presenting to emergency would start at the marquees.
"They'll be met by a nurse, a 'meet and greet', which will be next to the emergency department, not in it but next to it," she said.
"There will be a quick triage to run through any respiratory issues and then those patients will be funnelled into the respiratory area versus the non-respiratory area to try and keep them separate."
Nurses' union wants system extended to regions
Australian Nurses Federation (ANF) state secretary Mark Olson said he thought the marquee triage system was a "great idea", which would ease concerns he had been hearing about congested emergency departments.
"This is straight from the nurses over the last couple of days, what they are seeing in the emergency departments is congestion and people taking off their masks to activate their mobile phones," he said.
"If we can have a kiosk system leading to a marquee, what that does is put a little bit more distance between the public and the waiting room of the emergency department."
Mr Olson said the marquees would need to be properly equipped to ensure patients and staff were comfortable, particularly on hot days.
"You can imagine if its 40 degrees outside, not only would it be a little bit uncomfortable for the members of the public but it's going to be extremely uncomfortable for somebody who may be dressed in full PPE," he said.
"The other thing is that they need to have the same type of system at Bunbury, Geraldton, Kalgoorlie, Albany, they need to be looking at the same type of system in those regional centres."
Ms Sanderson said discussions were ongoing with the WA Country Health Service.
ANF says health workers still in the dark
Mr Olson said the marquees showed the government must have some plans in place, but he questioned why health workers weren't being informed.
"If they've got more of these ideas, they need to let the staff know to assuage the fears and concerns that staff have."
Mr Olson said the government urgently needed to reveal what the protocols in WA would be around classifying someone as a close contact, how those people would be dealt with, and how quickly they could re-join the workforce.
"I think the most basic piece of information at the moment is what is going to be defined as a close contact, I think it's leaving it a bit late," he said.
"I've had directors of nursing of major hospitals saying to me 'we need to know what is a close contact and then what will be the procedure after that'.
"This is really important information, I don't think that definition is going to change very much between now and February 5, so I would implore the Health Minister to get that definition out there."
Concern from doctors
Australian Medical Association WA president Mark Duncan-Smith said tents had been used previously outside of hospitals in Victoria to deal with the pandemic.
"And there were no protocols in place, they just erected the tents because the emergency departments in the hospitals were quite simply at capacity," Dr Duncan-Smith said.
"That was an on-the-run, emergency action, because they were basically just absolutely chock-a-block full of COVID patients.
"I think it is an indictment that the system doesn't have the capacity to handle what is expected to be the Omicron wave of sick people going to emergency departments."
Dr Duncan-Smith said he was baffled the Health Minister would go to the length of explaining the marquee system while other planned health measures remained under wraps.
"There are so many things that we just don't know about at this stage, and one of the last things we need on the list to know about is tents in the front of emergency departments.
"They are talking about putting tents outside emergency departments and yet we don't know the protocol for testing staff each day, we don't know the protocol for testing patients, we don't know if they are going to be cancelling elective surgery.
"What I would like to know about is what is going to be happening with elective surgery, how many cases a day are they expecting, when the peak is going to be, what restrictions they are going to introduce."
System will 'recalibrate': Minister
Ms Sanderson spoke briefly about hospital "surge plans" yesterday but did not go into detail.
"The system will recalibrate, and we will put into place the surge plans, the surge plans involve also the private hospital capacity," she said.
"We want to be in a place in our hospitals where we are still dealing with non-COVID urgent issues that will always arrive.
"But it would be non-urgent issues that we would need to take staff from there and pull them into where they are required to be."
Ms Sanderson said it was not helpful for governments to publicise "draft plans" and that any modelling currently available based on the Omicron variant of COVID remained "very preliminary".
