Workplace becomes Covid ‘jab-space’
Private sector is vaccinating its staff as fast as supply permits
● In a giant sports hall at the Sasol recreation club in Secunda, workers in overalls and high-visibility gear are moving along the line to get their vital signs checked and their arms jabbed with the Covid vaccine.
The vaccination site opened on Monday as the company seeks to inoculate 11,000 contractors and 8,000 of its own staff who will be involved in the annual maintenance shutdown of the Secunda synfuels plant, which starts late next month.
This is the priority for the sports hall vaccination site, which will be able to administer more than 1,000 doses a day at full capacity. After that, it will move on to vaccinating the 11,000 mineworkers at the mines feeding the Secunda plant, along with the rest of the workforce.
And after that, it hopes to extend vaccines to workers’ families and the local community, working in partnership with the Mpumalanga provincial government. Earlier this month, Sasol got the go-ahead to administer shots to its staff at the company medical centre in Secunda.
It was bankers and work-from-home tracksuits at another, rather different workplace site that opened on Monday at the FNB Conference Centre in Sandton.
This is an aggregator site that will offer vaccinations for staff of the big six banks across Gauteng, as well as employees of smaller banks and others in the financial sector including the JSE, the South African Special Risks Insurance Association, investment banks and insurers.
Benjamin April, a general manager at the Banking Association SA (Basa), says the pool totals about 130,000 people, including 97,000 bank employees, who can choose to have their vaccines at the site.
The big banks can block-book days that suit their schedules for their staff to go for shots at the conference centre. The site was administering about 600-700 doses a day this week, but it can double this.
Basa has partnered on the running of the Sandton site with the Wits Healthcare Consortium, a nonprofit arm of the university’s health science department that has extensive experience in managing large projects.
The pharmacist is a key person at any vaccine site and in this case it is Wits pharmacy lecturer Moosa Kharodia, who is bringing in his students for training before he releases them to the national department of health to support the public sector rollout.
Basa MD Bongiwe Kunene says the department of health asked the financial sector to open a mass site, and the industry is planning sites in other provinces. Some of these, in provinces with small financial sectors, could offer shots for staff from other sectors.
Then there are the mines, with their extraordinary health-care infrastructure, much of it in remote parts of SA.
From the start the mining industry pushed for workplace sites to be included as a key part of the national vaccine rollout, saying they could quickly vaccinate up to 3million people, including the industry’s own 450,000 workers as well as their families and communities. Mining companies volunteered to pay some of the cost.
Impala Platinum, which has one of the industry’s three full-function hospitals, hosted SA’s first workplace site and capacity is now being ramped up across the industry, with almost 48,000 employees having received their first dose by Friday.
The industry is working in partnership with, and in some cases assisting, provincial health departments; and it’s worked closely with trade unions.
Sibanye Stillwater’s Libanon clinic vaccine site, one of eight sites run by the group, hosted a visit this week for media and senior officials of the four trade unions representing mineworkers — the National Union of Mineworkers, the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union, Solidarity and the United Association of SA — all of whom got their jabs, along with a line of mine security personnel in camouflage overalls.
Post-vax party packs
Sibanye has so far administered first doses to more than 18,500 of its 80,000 employees, 8,500 of them in the past week. A nice touch at Libanon — a disused clinic that was reopened for the rollout — was the “party pack” of painkiller, mask, sanitiser and other goodies that vaccinated miners, who are generally bussed in from the various shafts in the area when they come off shift, got to take home.
A total of about 150 workplace sites are potentially available, with 57 operating currently and a further 19 due to come online in the next two weeks, says Business for SA (B4SA), which is co-ordinating the private sector vaccine rollout in support of the government.
The mining industry alone already has capacity of 13,000 shots a day and, if all its potential sites receive accreditation, could take this up to 21,000 daily, says Minerals Council CEO Roger Baxter. He says the industry’s CEOs have made a point of getting their doses at the mines, rather than at the local pharmacy or Discovery.
SA’s workplace sites, across a wide range of sectors that include retail and automotive and the taxi organisations, could potentially account for 11% of total private sector capacity, which is currently at 120,000 doses a day but could expand to 200,000, though the constraint for now is supply — the private sector has been allocated at most 77,000 daily doses by the government.
The workplace models are all quite different to each other, with things “winged” in different ways, as Sasol’s group head of health Dr Hilko Johannsmeier puts it.
“That pliability and flexibility is what we need because you’ve got different audiences and they need slightly different solutions. What I really appreciate from the department of health is that they allow those degrees of freedom in order to get the people vaccinated, whatever it takes,” he says.
Compared with other countries, SA’s workplace programme is unusual, if not unique. It leverages off an extensive private health-care infrastructure that is to some extent a response to poor public sector provision, but also, in the case of the mines in particular, was developed thanks to occupational health and safety legislation that requires every worker’s health to be checked at least once a year, along with monitoring for various occupational health hazards.
A group such as Sibanye, for example, employed 740 full-time health workers even before it took on a few more for Covid.
But SA’s workplace rollout is unique too because, unlike Europe for example, where the public sector takes responsibility, including in the workplace where needed, in SA it’s the private sector doing the work and picking up some of the cost.
But unlike in the US, the private sector vaccine provision is heavily regulated by the public sector, which vets every site and imposes complex and often cumbersome requirements.
However, the department of health has become more flexible. It reduced the initial minimum workforce required for a site from 10,000 to 4,000. Another key piece of the puzzle was an agreement that allows private sites to charge the state for those not on medical aids, even though most formal sector workers would be covered.
Most recently, and crucially, on Monday it issued a circular opening up workplace sites to all over-18s. That will allow these “closed” sites, which have to register employees with their consent and upload them in bulk to the electronic vaccination data system, to move their workforces faster and more efficiently through the sites.
And that in turn will allow them to later become “open sites” that serve the broader community. Importantly, Dr Nicholas Crisp, a deputy director-general in the department of health, confirmed at a B4SA briefing this week that there was no limitation on whom the workplace sites could vaccinate — but also no expectation they had to open their facilities to workers’ families.
“We can’t force a company to do that, but lots of companies have already indicated they wish to do so.” There was no reason that shouldn’t happen, said Crisp, who welcomed the idea.
He also said no site in SA, private or public, was getting vaccines at the moment — but promised that once the supply improves, as it should within a couple of weeks, sites will be allowed to ramp up very quickly.
And in a remark that reflected how difficult and yet successful the public/private collaboration has been, Crisp ended the B4SA briefing with a warm acknowledgement of the business sector’s role: “Thank you very much to the colleagues who have given me such a hard time.”
That flexibility is what we need because you’ve got different audiences Hilko Johannsmeier
Head of health, Sasol