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MONDAY, AUGUST 3, 2020
‘We fill the hands that heal’
Meet the team that ensures NUH staff are equipped to ight COVID19.
SINGAPORE
(CNA)
-
Personal
protective gear like masks and face
shields has been in high demand
during the COVID19 pandemic, and
perhaps no one knows this better
than a team tasked with ensuring that
frontline healthcare workers have
whatever they need.
Such things are just a few out of
the 2,600 items that the team from the
National University Hospital’s (NUH)
Materials Management Department is
in charge of.
Behind the scenes, the team has
been ensuring that their colleagues
do not run out of the essential
“armour” that is needed in the ight
in the disease that has infected more
than 52,000 people in Singapore.
“We have to keep more stocks
just in case there’s an event where
the vendor has a stock-out issue,
then we’ll be able to support the
end user. So therefore we stock up
a little bit, especially those fast-
moving (items), whereby we want
to keep about a month’s worth of
supplies,” said logistics manager
Ryan Chiam.
These fast-moving items include
blood tubes, needles and gauze, he
said. He was speaking during a media
tour of the department’s storage
facility at the basement in one of
NUH’s buildings.
The heart of the team of more
than 50 staff members are the
storekeepers. They typically do a
physical check to ind out what
is needed by each clinic, ward or
operating theatre and inform a team
member, who then gives the go-
ahead for these items to be issued.
The storekeepers walk down rows
and rows of items arranged according
to their material group at the storage
facility, loading up their trolleys while
armed with a list.
They then push these trolleys to
the different destinations within the
hospital grounds, and help to unpack
and arrange the products in utility
rooms. It is this manual work that
has increased with the pandemic, as
the need for replenishment comes
faster.
“PPE (Personal Protective Equip-
ment) is something that we used to top
up maybe two or three times a week.
Now, we have to go every day,” said
Kenny Tang, who heads the team.
Tang said that many storekeepers
have been with the hospital for
decades, with half of the team aged
between 50 and 68.
“Being an old hospital, there’s very
limited IT (Information Technology)
solutions or technology that we can
leverage on, so it’s still a very manual
process.”, he said.
“It’s very hard on my staff. This
is Kent Ridge right? The terrain is
not a flat thing where you can go
around easily.”
On top of that, the team also
receives a higher number of urgent
requests for supplies.
Senior executive assistant Lim
Chun Bin said that before COVID-
19, there would be two to three
such requests a day, but now there
are about 10. There were also fewer
items being requested then. Now,
there could be more than 20 items
being requested.
“Usually they are requesting for
those protective covers, like the
gowns, the masks, and stuff like that,”
she said.
“The requests come in quite fast,
so even on my non-working days,
I also do check my email and try to
respond to them,” she added.
The team also provides supplies to
support the medical teams providing
care at foreign worker dormitories,
and around 40 per cent of their
COVID19 related supplies like N95
masks, gloves and gowns go there.
The increased workload comes at
a time when the team on any given
day has become leaner, due to split-
team work arrangements.
The employees work alternate
days, including on weekends, and
work longer hours each day. They are
supported by temporary staff.
The full-time employees now
work from 8am to 9pm. Other than
performing more manual work, the
team has also had to get creative in
making sure suficient supplies are
kept on hand.
Corporate gift vendors may not be
the irst to come to mind when trying
to get a supply of face shields, but
they are precisely the people Tang
and his team reached out to.
Tang said that they had to turn to
“non-traditional” sources.
While most of the PPE, like masks,
was drawn from a national stockpile,
there were some things, like face
shields, that the hospital had to bring
in on its own, he said.
“Face shields were one of those
things that we needed to bring
in quickly and at a time where
everybody’s trying to grab the face
shields,” he said.
Storekeeper Nazarndi Mohd Abi (R) and store supervisor Abdul Wahap
Mydin Pillay making sure their colleagues on the frontlines of the COVID 19
pandemic are properly equipped. PHOTO: CNA