22 July 2020
By Elaine Murphy
elaine@TheCork.ie
Cork Kerry Community Healthcare has thanked the GAA for its support in making Pairc Ui Chaoimh available since March as a test centre for Covid-19.
The Cork city community testing centre has been located at Pairc Ui Chaoimh since March 22nd, following a decision by the Cork County Board to make the site available to the HSE.
Des Cullinane, Children’s Officer, Cork GAA (back right) and Niamh McCarthy, Events Manager, Pairc Ui Chaoimh (front left). wishing the testing team good luck with their move to Glanmire.
Pic: Brian Lougheed
The centre has now relocated to Glanmire. This is a temporary location, and the centre will relocate again to a site on the northside of Cork city in the coming weeks.
This test centre has been a busy centre, staff assigned to Pairc Ui Chaoimh have tested both members of the public who have been referred for testing and have also supported the recent mass testing of residents and staff from residential care facilities across Cork. They have worked with the National Ambulance Service, the defence forces and HSE colleagues in Public Health. In total, staff have tested more than 20,000 people either at Pairc Ui Chaoimh itself or at residential centres across Cork.
Head of Primary Care with Cork Kerry Community Healthcare, Teresa O’Donovan said:
“We would like to thank the GAA for their support in providing Pairc Ui Chaoimh as a venue at very short notice. Their support has been invaluable over recent months and assisted us as we rapidly increased the number of tests being carried out and expanded our testing capacity.”
Ms O’Donovan also paid tribute to the staff working at all four Cork Kerry Community Healthcare Covid-19 test centres across Cork and Kerry.
“We’re very proud of the work of the staff at all four of our test centres across Cork and Kerry. At Pairc Ui Chaoimh, staff got this test centre up and running extremely efficiently in just a few days. This enabled us to meet the significant demand for testing appointments.”
More than 70 staff across Cork and Kerry were redeployed to Covid-19 test centres in recent months, including nurses, therapy staff from a range of professions, oral health staff, and administrative staff.
The current waiting time for to have a swab taken in the Cork and Kerry region remains under 24 hours.
“This is thanks to the huge efforts of the staff involved at every stage of the testing process. We appreciate the efforts of the hard-working staff at all test centres and we wish to thank them for their efforts. They worked tirelessly to set up an extremely efficient testing process, and they also supported the universal screening for residents in residential centres,”
Teresa O’Donovan added.
Anyone referred for a test is reminded that while they are waiting for either the test itself or the result, they must self-isolate.