Hamilton public health collecting extra vaccination data in survey
Hamilton is launching a COVID-19 vaccination data-collecting effort that aims to gather sociodemographic information including race, ethnicity and household income.
The goal is to determine who is being vaccinated, notably people from racialized and marginalized communities who have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic, public health says.
This information will help officials to “ensure equity of access to vaccination” and improve on its delivery.
The city ran a four-day test run of the voluntary survey during the week of March 29 at the FirstOntario Centre vaccination clinic on York Boulevard.
“We had over 700 people who were asked to complete the questionnaire. We had a very, very good response rate,” Dr. Elizabeth Richardson, the city’s medical officer of health, told councillors Wednesday.
“We had a very, very good response rate.” DR. ELIZABETH RICHARDSON HAMILTON MEDICAL OFFICER OF HEALTH
The plan is to move ahead with a data-collecting effort at FirstOntario and mobile popup clinics this week.
Public health is consulting with St. Joseph’s Healthcare and Hamilton Health Sciences about how they do the same at their clinics, Richardson said.
Coun. Nrinder Nann called that “great news,” saying the results “are going to be quite significant.”
“I think this it is going to be key in terms of that demographic information that we are using locally here in Hamilton.”
The survey information is modelled after the Ministry of Health Consent of Sociodemographic Data form, which asks respondents about their race, ethnic or cultural origin, income, how many live in households and languages spoken.
Richardson noted the city continues to gather data relating to the social determinants of health for coronavirus cases.
Data presented at the February board of health meeting showed the five neighbourhoods with the highest proportion of racialized people were in census tracts that fall into the two highest groups of COVID-19 per 100,000 population.
Two were in downtown’s Ward 2, two were in west Hamilton’s Ward 1 and one was in the east end’s Ward 5. At the time, they had incidence rates of at least 1,330 per 100,000 population with some in the group as high as 5,000.
The city started its sociodemographic data collection May 26 following the March 11 start of the pandemic but took a hiatus in gathering some information in January when staff became too busy amid the second wave.