A Nova Scotia woman who regularly goes to the hospital is hoping the province won’t backtrack on its COVID-19 vaccine requirement for health-care workers after two other provinces announced the shots won’t be mandatory.
Carole Arsenault, who lives in the Halifax area and uses a wheelchair, has been to the hospital nine times in the last year.
“Anything from blood tests, to the ER, to MRIs, X-rays, bone scans — you name it, I’ve been there,” she said.
Two provinces — Quebec and Ontario — announced this week that they will not require health-care workers to get fully vaccinated against COVID-19, pointing to the negative impact the mandate could have on staffing within the health-care system.
“I understand both points of view, that they’re scared to lose health-care workers, and that’s a real challenge … but do you want health-care workers that may make your clients, your patients ill?” said Arsenault.
“I’d rather know I’m safe and have to wait a couple of weeks or days longer to see someone, than not know if the person I’m dealing with has been double vaccinated.”
Currently, Nova Scotia is requiring that all provincial employees — including health-care workers — get vaccinated by Nov. 30. The province recently extended its deadline for those who have already received their first shot.
Any worker who is partially vaccinated by Nov. 15 and who intends to get a second dose will have another eight weeks to get one.
Workers who fail to get vaccinated risk being forced onto unpaid administrative leave.
After seeing what’s happening in Quebec and Ontario, Arsenault is worried Nova Scotia might abandon its policy.
“I live alone in a wheelchair, my partner passed away recently so there’s no one to take care of me if I get sick,” she said. “If I have to go to the hospital I want to feel safe there, I want to know these people aren’t going to give me COVID.”
‘Good movement’ toward vaccination
It’s currently unclear how many of the province’s health-care workers have been vaccinated. On Thursday, Health Minister Michelle Thompson said the numbers are still “preliminary,” but there should be more information on Friday.
“We’ll just continue to look at the numbers and understand where the impacts are in the system and to what degree they are,” she said.
“It is a bit complicated to collect the data with shift work, and things like that, but we’re confident, and again we’ve seen some good movement towards vaccination so we are encouraged by that.”
Thompson said that for now, the vaccine requirement for health-care workers is still in place.
“It’s there for a reason. We want to protect health-care workers, we want to protect patients, we want to protect the system,” she said. “This isn’t about penalizing people, we want to work with them to ensure that folks are safe.”
In neighbouring New Brunswick, Health Minister Dorothy Shephard said Thursday there are around 1,900 health-care workers who have yet to be fully vaccinated before the deadline of Nov. 19.
“I’m sure that we will be following this and looking into how we manage going forward after the 19th,” she said.
Protecting the vulnerable
Infectious disease expert Dr. Lisa Barrett said having high vaccination rates is “incredibly important,” especially with the more serious variants of COVID-19.
She said places with vaccine mandates tend to have higher rates of people who are vaccinated.
“And that is particularly important with Delta, and with unvaccinated parts of our population still present, like (children) under 12,” she said.
“It would be concerning if there was any change in policy or practice that would limit high rates of vaccination.”
She said it’s particularly important for health-care workers to be vaccinated since their jobs involve interacting with people who are sick.
“When people are sick they are very vulnerable, particularly to things like COVID,” she said. “Even when they are vaccinated, they may be more vulnerable than other people.”
She said vaccinations, paired with voluntary ongoing testing programs are a “key, core part” in keeping vulnerable people protected.
A ‘professional obligation’
Tim Guest, the president of the Canadian Nurses Association, said they along with the Canadian Medical Association have been calling for mandatory vaccines for all health-care workers since the summer.
“I believe that they have the right to a personal decision about whether they get vaccinated, but they also have a professional obligation to protect the people they provide care to, and they need to follow evidence and science,” he said.
“And all of the evidence and science suggests that getting vaccinated is the right way to go, and they have to live with the choice that they make.”
He said nurses are usually required to be vaccinated for other diseases — such as measles, hepatitis B, and polio — to enter the profession in the first place and said it’s “hypocritical” to not want to get vaccinated against COVID-19.
Guest said the association was “disappointed” in Ontario and Quebec for not requiring health-care workers to get the shot.
“We believe that it wasn’t the right decision, that the appropriate approach would be to continue to support individuals in providing them the information they need to make an informed decision,” he said.
“And we believe that the right decision for health-care workers is to get vaccinated.”
While health-care worker shortages are a concern, he noted that the fourth wave of the pandemic has been largely carried by unvaccinated people and said allowing unvaccinated people to work with vulnerable patients is a bad idea.
“We place our entire health system at risk by having individuals working that can create exposure to this virus,” said Guest.
“The other piece is we place a significant risk on the health system by having individuals that aren’t protected, so when they become exposed, we lose them anyway.”
He added that health-care workers should help the public reach a decision about getting their own vaccines “by following all the evidence and the science.”
“The public looks to us, and I think we need to demonstrate leadership.”
–With files from Alicia Draus and Jesse Thomas
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