Two-thirds of staff in aged care homes not vaccinated - The Age

Two-thirds of staff working in aged care homes across Australia remain unvaccinated, figures from the federal Health Department show.

The data was gathered after the department forced aged care operators to report staff immunisations. It became clear last month that the Morrison government had little knowledge of what proportion of nursing home workers were vaccinated.

By Friday, Health Department figures released to The Age showed that only 33.6 per cent of staff had received their first immunisation. Of 263,000 workers, just over 88,000 had received their first shot and about 43,000 had received a second dose by this week.

Almost all the country’s 2869 residential aged care homes reported to the government on their vaccination level.

Professor Joseph Ibrahim, head of Monash University’s Health Law and Ageing Research Unit, said: “It’s an astonishingly low number vaccinated. It’s difficult to understand given staff were in the priority group, and we are in the middle of winter, which is the most dangerous time.”

Professor Joseph Ibrahim: “It’s an astonishingly low number vaccinated.”

The vaccination data came as the NSW government locked down four inner Sydney council areas in an attempt to slow the spread of the highly contagious Delta coronavirus variant.

There were 22 new cases recorded in Sydney on Friday as a week-long lockdown was announced for inner-city Sydney and eastern suburbs including Vaucluse, Double Bay and Paddington, amid an explosion in the number of exposure sites.

In Melbourne, it emerged that the two men who tested positive for coronavirus after being linked to a Sydney super-spreader event were unvaccinated despite being older than 60 and therefore eligible for the vaccine. The two men both work at a Sandringham dry-cleaning shop. One of the men was infected at the Sydney event.

Meanwhile, some GPs have said they are concerned about how they will get through AstraZeneca vaccine doses before they reach their use-by date, amid falling demand for the British-made vaccine.

All aged care residents and staff were meant to be vaccinated in the first phase of the Morrison government’s vaccination rollout, which began in February and was meant to be completed in six weeks.

It is voluntary for aged care workers to get vaccinated, and voluntary for them to advise their employer if they have been immunised. However, home managers must now report their level of staff vaccination to the federal Health Department each week.

About 10 per cent of Australia’s aged care homes are publicly run, and most staff are vaccinated in these centres. About a third of homes are run by for-profit providers under a federally run system and the remainder are operated by charities and not-for-profit groups.

The Age approached Aged Care Minister Greg Hunt and Aged Care Services Minister Richard Colbeck for comment on the vaccination program but received a response from the Health Department. “Ensuring all aged care residents and staff have access to a vaccine is a priority of the government,” a department spokesman said.

Labor’s aged care spokeswoman, Clare O’Neil, said the vaccine rollout in aged care was disgraceful.

“Aged care workers were supposed to all be vaccinated by the end of March,” she said. “It’s now three months later, and they have only managed to vaccinate a third of all workers.″⁣

The federal figures came as a new report commissioned by the Andrews government found that aged care homes in Victoria must have better plans in place to respond to coronavirus, more personal protective equipment and knowledge of how to use it, and a strict rule workers do not move between sites.

There were 655 resident deaths from coronavirus in Victoria’s privately run aged care homes last year, and almost 2000 infections. In Victoria’s 176 publicly run aged care homes, the majority of which are in regional Victoria, there were 15 coronavirus infections and no deaths.

The new report, by the National Ageing Research Institute, was handed to the state government this month and recommended that to avoid a repeat of the disaster in private aged care, homes needed to follow a number of key rules. These included:

• being better prepared, including having specific contingency plans should all staff need to be furloughed, as happened in several Melbourne homes in 2020;
• a better supply of PPE and staff knowledge of how to use it;
• that staff movements between aged care homes be restricted because of the higher risk of coronavirus transmission between centres, and;
• that poor working conditions will increase the risk of major coronavirus outbreaks.

National Ageing Research Institute director Briony Dow said the pandemic had revealed “a whole lot of problems [in aged care] that were already there, like staff having to work in multiple facilities to make a living wage, and not really understanding what infection control meant”.

Professor Dow said the clearest issue the pandemic had exposed was the low rates of pay and poor working conditions for aged care staff. Personal care assistants generally earn about $24 an hour on a typical weekday. Most casual staff work at more than one aged care home.

“The workforce needs to be paid properly and to have career pathways to have a living wage or better, working in one agency,” Professor Dow said.

She said the damage to the mental health of the aged care workforce was also something more Melburnians needed to be aware of.

“During the pandemic, nurses were getting chocolates and accolades and, meanwhile, aged care workers were getting spat on and abused,” she said. “It’s not only the underlying issues of pay; it’s how much they are valued.”

Professor Dow said the effect of the pandemic on aged care had also placed a spotlight on the Commonwealth-state relationship. With hundreds of new cases in homes last year, Canberra and the state created the Victorian Aged Care Response Centre, to manage the response in aged care homes.

“It was a really excellent centre that did great work,” Professor Dow said.

She said the pandemic had shown how the rights of older people in aged care could be taken away too easily. “We saw people isolated in their rooms, no communal dining. They were moved into hospital despite their end-of-life plan saying it’s not what they wanted. All of their rights went out the window, and that’s really an ... issue that no one has come to terms with.”

Melbourne University professor Kwang Lim is a geriatrician who also works with Melbourne Health. He worked through the worst of last year’s outbreaks in aged care.

“I didn’t catch it, which was amazing because I was one of the first doctors, and we were just wearing surgical masks,” he said. Professor Lim said that over the past few decades, the levels of care needed in nursing homes had increased dramatically.

“When I started training, people who went into homes were fairly fit. Whereas now [many people] are pretty disabled when [they] go in.” he said. ″⁣Mortality is fairly high, and so the caring requirements are fairly high.”

He said this was part of the reason vaccinations were so crucial in aged care, both in staff and residents. Professor Lim questioned why it had not been made compulsory for workers to have been given a coronavirus vaccination. “Everyone who comes in has to sign a form saying they have had a flu vaccine, so I don’t know what the difference is,” he said.

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2021-06-25 19:30:00Z
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