February 23, 2022, 04:50 PM
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Ho Ching, Chairman of Temasek Trust, has taken to Facebook on Feb. 23 to slam employers who make their employees get a medical certificate just to document that they are really down with Covid-19 even after a positive antigen rapid test result.
Ho lashed out at employers who are not only causing the bottleneck at general practitioner clinics to get worse, but also putting their employees' at risk of worsening their own condition while spreading the virus to others at already congested areas.
She called employers who do so "unconscionable and irresponsible".
Alternative ways to handle admin
In lieu of getting MCs from doctors at clinics, Ho suggested three ways for human resource departments to deal with employees who go down with Covid-19.
The first way is to have an honour system where absent employees are trusted to be indeed ill with Covid-19.
The second way is have a supervised test with HR over a video.
And the third is to get tested at quick test centres located islandwide away from GP clinics.
You can read her full post here:
Do not ask our staff to go get an MC after testing ART+, just so that we have a proper documentary record for our own bureaucratic and administrative requirements.
These are extraordinary times, and sending an ART+ staff to a GP clinic to get an MC is just causing one more point of infection transmission.
Employers, HR personnel and work supervisors have 3 options:
First is to work on an honor system, and trust our employees to do their DIY ART at home, mark their test cartridge with name, date and time, and send a photo of their results. This can serve as an HR record in lieu of an MC.
Second is to have our own supervised DIY test - set up a booth for a supervisor, to witness the staff doing the test and observe the results for ourselves including taking a photo - or we could do this over zoom, WhatsApp or whatever suitable remote video method.
Third is to send the employee to a quick test centre to to a supervised self test.
Do NOT ask the employees to go to GPs, polyclinics or the hospital A&Es for additional tests - this brings more infectious nodes into places with many other potentially highly vulnerable people seeking serious medical attention.
That is unconscionable and irresponsible to put a known ART+ employee into a setting where there are lots of patients, who are sick, frail, and more vulnerable than the general population bcos their immune system is likely to be down when they are sick, old or frail and needing medical attention.
Top photos via Temasek & Goh Meng Seng
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