Huron Perth Healthcare Alliance president and CEO Andrew Williams said Friday there is currently no plan to implement a mandatory COVID-19 booster policy for its hospital staff.
Officials at the Stratford-area hospital group aren’t considering a policy requiring hospital staff to receive a COVID-19 vaccine booster to continue working, its president and CEO says.
Despite unrolling a mandatory vaccination policy that saw the vast majority of area hospital employees roll up their sleeves last fall, Andrew Williams told the Beacon Herald Friday the notion of mandating booster shots for Huron Perth Healthcare Alliance employees is not on the table unless circumstances change for the worst.
“We have not made it a requirement,” Williams said. “We are very much promoting (third doses) for all of our team. We’re offering, actually, on-site booster clinics, so certainly reinforcing the importance of it, but we have not embedded it into our COVID immunization policy as a requirement.
“We’re following public-health direction. Certainly the science reinforces the importance of boosters, and so we’re sharing that, but … in any hospitals that we partner with, we haven’t made those determinations. We are continuing to follow the news as everybody is, and we would course correct if we felt we needed to.”
While Williams said area hospitals are still coping with staffing shortages because of workers being exposed to the virus or waiting for test results, he made it clear the hospital group’s decision to not tweak the policy wasn’t driven by concerns about the potential for reduced staff capacity.
“When we make decisions, we look at all the issues, and if we decided to go down the third dose road, we would do it collectively with other organizations. … As we did when we mandated the initial policy, we knew that there would unfortunately be people making decisions (to leave their jobs instead of getting vaccinated) and we accepted that. If we go down this road again, we will obviously look at that in detail,” Williams said.
Currently, there are just four people across Huron Perth who are in hospital being treated for COVID-19 infections, and only two of those cases are considered active infections, o Huron Perth public health data reported Friday.
Among the hospitals under the Huron Perth Healthcare Alliance umbrella, only the Clinton Public Hospital is experiencing an active COVID-19 outbreak, with two patients and two staff having tested positive earlier this month. However, Williams said he anticipates that outbreak will likely be declared over soon.
According to data published by the local health unit on Monday, just half of Huron-Perth residents aged five and older have received three doses of a COVID-19 vaccine.
As the provincial government approaches another milestone on Feb. 21 in its plan for reopening the province – when, among other restrictions being relaxed, social-gathering limits will be increased to 25 people indoors and 100 people outdoors, and capacity limits will be removed for restaurants and other indoor settings – local health officials are expecting a related increase in COVID-19 hospitalizations, Williams said.
“Our modeling for hospital admissions right now is showing that, as restrictions ease, we do anticipate there will be an uptick in hospitalizations, so obviously we’ll have to monitor that,” Williams said. “If we feel, as a system, that the booster is mandatory, then we will go down that road. At this point, it is not something that we have put on the table and we would do it only as part of a broader discussion with other hospitals in the area and public health.”
While Williams said alliance employees have been encouraged to report whether they’ve received a third dose of a COVID-19 vaccine to their employer, he could not immediately provide the proportion of hospital staff that has received three doses, noted any number offered would not be accurate since reporting of third doses is voluntary.