What we are doing to help you.
Dear wonderful community,
What a week (year!) this has been. We know this is such an overwhelming time for so many people. We would like to thank everyone who is trying so hard to do the right thing - staying home, practicing social distancing, wearing a mask, and hand sanitising.
We would also like to say a HUGE thank you to all of our essential workers at the moment. We are so grateful for your dedication to our community. We know the list is long, but we would particularly like to thank our Police, hospital staff, and the staff running our Covid testing and vaccination clinics. To all staff working in the Public Health Department and the Contact Tracing teams, thank you for all you are doing for our community. There are not enough words to show how much we appreciate you!!
To our wonderful communities across Dubbo and Regional NSW, we know this is scary, but we are in this together. If we continue to do the right thing and support each other, we will get through this. Please continue to follow the advice provided by NSW Health and Western NSW Local Health District, and continue to stay up-to-date with their evolving announcements.
We would like to provide you with an update on the current policies of our practices, and an outline of what we are doing to continue to support our community.
As an essential health service, at present our practices will remain open. If there are any changes to our policies or operating conditions in the coming days, we will advise you as soon as possible. For now, the following conditions apply to our practice:
- As an essential service, we will continue to provide health care services to our community.
- We will primarily be providing Telehealth and Telephone consultations. We want to protect our community, as well as our staff, so we will take steps to reduce the number of people within our practice. We appreciate your understanding at this time, and we are grateful we can utilise these methods to ensure we can still support you. Now more than ever we need to take care of our health, so please know we remain here to help.
- The stay at home orders currently allow for people to leave home to access essential medical services. We will provide face-to-face services where essential, however this will primarily relate to services such as Covid vaccinations. Most other services will be provided by Telehealth where possible. If you do enter our practice, please ensure you wear a mask, check in with the QR code, and hand sanitise upon entry.
- If entering our practice, please ensure you do not have any respiratory symptoms, even if they are mild. If you have had any respiratory symptoms in the past 7 days, please ensure you provide us with a negative Covid result before entering our practice. Please be honest with our reception staff if you have any symptoms. We want to keep our team and our community safe. We want to get these numbers down!
- Please be assured that we will be taking extra steps to ensure sanitisation of our practice.
- We know our phones are very busy at present. We have set up additional resources, and we are doing our best to respond to your calls as quickly as we can. We appreciate your patience and understanding with our reception team. The hard work they are putting in behind the scenes to ensure our practice can stay open and continue to support our community is OUTSTANDING.
- Covid vaccinations - we know this is an INCREDIBLY hot topic at the moment. We would like to thank our wonderful community for coming forward to get vaccinated in these challenging times. We are receiving many calls related to vaccinations, and we are doing our best to respond to you as promptly as possible. At the moment our vaccination clinics are heavily booked. We want to help, and are attempting to increase our clinics if possible. We will update you if we are able to open additional spaces in the coming weeks. At present we only have the Astra Zeneca vaccine available. If we begin to provide Pfizer vaccinations, we will update you.
Once again, I would like to thank you all for doing the right thing, as well as for your ongoing patience and support of our team and practices. We know this is a challenging time for our community. Let's all stay safe, get tested, and look after each other.
Thinking of our entire community.
Kind Regards,
Tanya
CEO of Macquarie Health Collective and Macquarie Valley Family Practice