Covid-19: laboratory workers in Luxembourg are out of breath!
Laboratory staff denounce more and more frequent attacks. The pace and pressure added to a tense atmosphere.
Faced with the tidal wave of contamination Omicron in Luxembourg, 2,000 new cases per day, private medical analysis laboratories are in high demand, while continuing to play a key role in the strategy for exiting the current wave of the pandemic.
A situation that risks getting even worse with the introduction of CovidCheck mandatory at the workplace from January 15, 2022.
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“Between PCR, serological, antigenic and Rapid PCR, we are overwhelmed. It is additional work that is added to our daily medical analyzes. We are out of breath“, explains an employee of a laboratory, reached by telephone:” The demand for testing is enormous. We must have struggled to follow“.
Repeated assaults
Due to the massive influx of laboratory screening centers, often giving rise to long waits, tensions are increasing. The staff of private laboratories denounce: “more and more frequent attacks. The daily life of staff in private laboratories is also currently marked by regular overtime and hellish work rates.”Notes in a press release the OGBL.
During a new question-and-answer session on Facebook, on January 7, the director of health, doctor Jean-Claude Schmit, specified that: “The health and laboratories of the country were in the process of requisitioning additional staff to take these samples.“. Certainly, this approach is appreciated by the employee of the laboratory contacted, but it is happening”a bit late“.
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Cruel lack of staff
According to the OGBL, the Covid crisis has accentuated increasingly difficult working conditions since the privatization of the medical biology sector in Luxembourg “(…) Laboratory staff and the entire medical biology sector constituting important and necessary elements of our health system in Luxembourg“.
In this context, the Health, Social and Educational Services union of the OGBL will intensify in the coming weeksits awareness campaign aimed at informing the public and the political world and the poor working conditions and inequalities are faced daily by employees of private laboratories“.
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