Suspended Scandinavian Airlines workers are being offered fast-tracked healthcare training to help Sweden’s national effort to fight off coronavirus.
Sophiahemmet University will initially run a three-day pilot for 30 people at the end of March with the hope of extending the course to hundreds more shortly. Already, 250 out of 1,100 SAS staff approached have signed up.
The airline has temporarily offloaded 10,000 staff, approximately 90 per cent of its workers, as flight demand has all but disappeared from Europe with many countries closing borders or strongly advising against international travel.
“There are incredibly competent people who will be able to offer relief to our healthcare immediately after completing the training so that doctors and nurses can to an even greater extent devote themselves to caring for patients,” Johanna Adami, principal at the University, said.
Funding is provided by the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation, so the course will be free of charge and the companies involved with the training are not seeking to make a profit.
The students will be trained in providing information to patients and families, sterilising surfaces and equipment, as well as basic administrative duties.
Fredrik Hillelson, chief executive of Novare Human Capital, is acting as co-ordinator and recruiter for the program.
“It is a small bright light in all the darkness to be able to do something positive, not just talking,” he said. “If we can be a positive initiative that gets other people to think outside the box, I’m very happy.”
As airlines around the world are struck with the need to let staff go or stand down staff, they are faced with a moral dilemma of how to assist their workers in either finding other employment or suitable redundancies while ensuring they have a trained employee base in place once the industry recovers.
Australian airline Qantas has announced that around 20,000 employees would be stood down as they simply do not have planes flying. CEO Alan Joyce made suggestions that the staff may be able to be redeployed with partner organisations that are in talks with Qantas, including supermarket Woolworths, mining company Rio Tinto, and telco Telstra.
The major employers were part of half a dozen businesses that offered short-term jobs to Qantas staff on Thursday as the airline was forced to place staff on leave after suspending all international flights and reducing domestic flights.
