Public health doesn’t know how many care-home staff are vaccinated
Hospitals say 6,500 of their workers have had COVID-19 vaccine as concern mounts over misinformation online
Hamilton Health Sciences is expecting one-quarter of its workforce won’t get the COVID-19 vaccine.
“The vaccination is not mandatory,” the hospital network said in a statement.
It’s significant considering Hamilton Health Sciences (HHS) has roughly 15,000 staff, doctors, students and volunteers, so as many as 3,750 could be left unprotected.
The Ontario Medical Association (OMA) raised alarm Wednesday about the urgent need to combat misinformation spreading on social media that may discourage people from getting the COVID vaccine.
About 6,500 staff from HHS and St Joseph’s Healthcare were vaccinated as of Monday, said HHS. It’s nearly 30 per cent of the workforce, which includes 7,000 at St. Joseph’s.
Public health, meantime, doesn’t know how many residents and staff of seniors’ homes have been vaccinated despite this
vulnerable group being highest priority.
The last number provided to The Spectator was, as of Jan. 14, 4,300 out of 6,200 eligible staff and essential caregivers at the city’s long-term-care homes and high-risk retirement homes.
However that number could have changed significantly by now considering 2,500 hospital staff alone were vaccinated between Jan. 14 and Jan. 18 — before shortages of the PfizerBioNTech vaccine caused public health to strictly limit it to staff and residents of seniors’ homes.
The mobile clinic has vaccinated 4,594 in long-term-care and high-risk retirement homes as of Wednesday. But public health can’t break down who got the vaccines except to say the majority were residents.
An overall total of the number of people vaccinated in Hamilton as of Thursday wasn’t even provided. On Monday, it was 13,400.
Public health said in a statement that it doesn’t have access to “reliable and consistent” data, but it’s not clear why. There’s also questions about why the number of staff vaccinated could be provided Jan. 14 but not now.
Hamilton’s medical officer of health, Dr. Elizabeth Richardson, blamed the province in a city briefing Monday.
“The challenge is that the system that we’re using that the province has put in place doesn’t give us the breakdowns — doesn’t collect the information in terms of residents versus staff when we’re in the homes,” she said.
But the Ministry of Health suggested in a statement Thursday that public health should now be able to provide the data.
A breakdown of those vaccinated is the latest information to no longer be available to the public as Hamilton stopped reporting how many doses it has on hand, citing a provincial gag order Jan 11.
It’s also significant considering questions have been raised about the high number of hospital staff vaccinated when long-term care is supposed to be the priority. The last time Hamilton had comparable counts on Jan. 14, it showed 4,300 staff from seniors’ homes and 4,000 hospital staff had been vaccinated.
The Toronto Star reported Thursday that only about 48 per cent of Ontario’s more than 72,000 long-term-care home residents have been vaccinated.
Richardson, along with HHS and St. Joseph’s, has said that only front-line hospital workers have been vaccinated, particularly those who work in the emergency department, ICU and COVID units.
However, The Spectator has obtained documents that show staff at St. Joseph’s Healthcare evaluate for themselves which of four priority groups they should be in.
“You will be asked about which of the four groups you fit into,” states the message dated Jan. 6 from interim chief of staff Dr. David Russell and Dr. Cheryl Williams, executive vice-president of clinical operations and chief nursing executive. “The four groups will be done in order.”
Staff were given a list of criteria to determine which sequence or priority was most appropriate, said St. Joe’s in a statement.
“Everyone signed an attestation to the accuracy,” says the statement. “Preliminary audits of this process suggest that the vast majority of people in Sequence 1 who received vaccines were appropriate.”
St. Joseph’s didn’t say how many were inappropriate or what jobs they do.
The document outlined how workers from each group would be placed in a lottery “to determine who will get the vaccine each day” and scheduled once their name is selected.
This was on top of a “standby list” for staff to come at the last minute when doses of vaccine were left at the end of the clinic day — “to ensure there is no waste.”
The document suggests that, starting Jan. 7, “all individuals who have signed up, will be put through a randomized selection process.”
So far, 2,000 of the 6,500 Hamilton hospital staff vaccinated are from St. Joseph’s.
Ontario’s doctors have flagged that “doubts and misinformation about how thoroughly the vaccines were tested or the extent of side effects are being shared widely on social media” among all age groups, but especially among those age 34 and younger.
They found those between the ages of 45 to 65 would like more “transparency” about the rollout.