Region focused on ensuring marginalized groups get vaccine
WATERLOO REGION — Mobile clinics will likely be essential to ensuring the COVID -19 vaccine reaches marginalized communities in Waterloo Region.
Bringing the vaccine to people where they are will be important to immunize those who traditionally face challenges to accessing health care, said Dr. Sharon Bal, a task force member and primary care physician lead in the region’s pandemic response.
“It’s not an efficient modality. It’s about access. It’s about being patient-centred and that’s why it’s so important to us,” Bal said during a stakeholder information session hosted by the region earlier this week. “We want residents to have choice, but we also really want to ensure access.”
Several groups face extra barriers to getting to a public vaccination site when they begin opening, such as immigrants, racialized communities and the homeless, and the region’s vaccine task force is focused on reaching those underserved people.
“We are working through other options through consultations with community leaders and health-care organizations that serve those communities,” Bal said.
That was also the thinking behind a pilot project launched earlier this month to open two pop-up COVID-19 testing sites in Kitchener, run out of community centres in specific neighbourhoods where access is an issue.
Reaching these groups is the goal of the vaccine task force’s community engagement working group, which includes members of the region’s AntiRacism Advisory Working Group.
Medical officer of health Dr. Hsiu-Li Wang said the community engagement work that’s being currently done is “extremely important” to ensure equitable distribution of the vaccine.
“We want to have those consultations with the traditionally underserved groups in our region to ensure that their voice informs the vaccine rollout plan and that we can optimize the vaccine uptake in these groups. It’s very important,” she said.
“Our goal is to ensure that everyone who wants a vaccine gets one.”
People without photo identification can still get the vaccine. All that’s needed is something that confirms the person’s identity, such as an employee identification.
“We are absolutely still able to immunize those without ID,” Bal said.
When people receive the first vaccine dose, they’ll be entered in a provincial database where the second dose will also be recorded.
Anyone who does not wish to be added to the provincial records can still receive the vaccine and the doses will be documented on paper to keep on file at public health.
The advantages of being in the digital central database is files don’t need to be transferred if a person moves and the record can be checked easily at a vaccine site.