AHS recruits for vaccinations and contact tracing
Alberta Health Services (AHS) is looking to recruit additional staff to administer the COVID-19 vaccine, as the province reported an estimated 1,300 new cases on Friday.
AHS said on social media that they are hoping to bring on board health-care providers, retirees, undergraduate nurses and community pharmacists to complement their public health immunizers.
“We will adjust the number of additional staff needed as the vaccine continues to arrive but already have received interest from hundreds of people, so we are confident we will be adequately staffed to meet our targets,” AHS tweeted Wednesday. “While we continue to recruit, we are also utilizing our existing workforce, including paying overtime when operationally required, to ensure we have the staff we need to deliver all vaccine available at this time.”
Vaccinations began in long-term care homes across the province after Alberta received 16,900 doses of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine on Tuesday. The province managed to complete 14,244 vaccinations by the end of 2020, less than half its stated goal.
On Friday, Premier Jason Kenney said the province is making “significant progress” in accelerating the pace of the COVID-19 vaccination program by having approximately 3,000 vaccinations performed on Friday, on top of 3,142 performed on Thursday.
“We should be at, or above, 17,000 Albertans having received their first dose of either the Pfizer or the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine by the end of today,” said Kenney. “We've moved from a pace of about 500 Albertans being vaccinated a day, to about 3,000 now and we're on the way to pace 4,000 a day.”
Some Albertans, including physicians, have criticized the initial hesitancy of the rollout.
Iranian-born physician Emel Ghaferi's offers to help during the first wave of the pandemic went for naught, so she returned to her homeland for three months where she worked in hospitals and clinics.
She was back in Edmonton in September and is now an office manager of a dental clinic but said she'd be willing to assist vaccination programs part-time.
“I could work on holidays or weekends, I'd be more than happy to work under supervision at this time,” said Ghaferi, whose Canadian qualifications are just shy of being able to practise independently.
“We need each other, we need to get this done.”
One of her foreign-credentialed colleagues, who has extensive experience with infectious disease control in west Africa, left Alberta for a medical job in Manitoba last fall.
Deidre Lake said she hopes AHS will tap more foreign medical graduates for immunization efforts after 60 members of her organization were hired to assist with contact tracing when that system was overwhelmed by rapidly mounting COVID-19 cases two months ago.
“We do have 1,200 members and do know many of them are looking for jobs,” said Lake, executive director of the Alberta International Medical Graduates Association of Alberta.
Her group has been involved in producing podcasts and videos in 19 languages to promote COVID-19 protocols “and we'd like to do the same thing with vaccinations and help with the vaccination rollout itself,” she said.
Phase 1 of the vaccination program involves immunizing frontline health care workers, long-term care residents and staff, those over 75 years of age and First Nations seniors.
Its second phase, to begin in April, will include more high-risk populations while the third instalment will expand to the general population in the fall of 2021, says AHS.
On Tuesday, the province received 16,900 doses of the Moderna vaccine, which is easier to distribute in remote communities because it doesn't require extreme freezing.
Meanwhile, AHS is also actively trying to hire more contact tracers. As of mid-december, the province has roughly 1,100 contact tracers.
In early December, AHS president and CEO Dr. Verna Yiu said they were on track to hire 1,800 by the end of December, bringing the ratio to 36 contact tracers per 100,000 people, which is on par with or better than other provinces.
Dr. Deena Hinshaw, Alberta's chief medical officer of health, provided a brief preliminary COVID-19 update on Twitter Thursday where she announced an estimated number of 1,200 new cases and 16,900 laboratory tests.
On Friday, Hinshaw announced another 1,300 estimated cases and 16,300 lab tests were conducted. The province's positivity rate sits at eight per cent, while hospitalizations and intensive care is currently stable, Hinshaw said.
As of Dec. 29, there are more than 14,000 active cases in the province.