As many as 2,700 health-care workers could be off the job now that the deadline for employees to provide proof of vaccination for COVID-19 has passed.
The province said Tuesday that 96.5 per cent of Nova Scotia Health Authority workers who have reported their vaccine status are fully vaccinated.
More than 21,000 workers have reported their status and all but 750 are fully vaccinated. But another 2,000 have not submitted proof.
Health authority employees and provincial government workers had until midnight Tuesday to submit a proof of vaccination. Those with no vaccination or who failed to report were told they would be put on unpaid leave. Those with proof of a first dose would be given time to get it.
Marla MacInnis, spokeswoman for the Department of Health, said the province would later this week provide an update on the vaccination status of health authority employees as well as those in other sectors.
It’s not clear whether the update will include details of any job action taken against those who haven’t reported or are unvaccinated.
Nurses are among those employed by the health authority. The Chronicle Herald has heard from five who have yet to report their vaccination status and were off the job on Wednesday. The Herald asked the Health Department on Wednesday how many nurses are unvaccinated or have not yet reported their status and whether any job action had been taken against nurses but that information was not provided.
The health authority employee numbers do not include doctors. According to the health authority’s latest annual report for 2020-21 there were more than 2,800 licensed physicians working in the province. The Herald asked the Health Department for the number of doctors that are either unvaccinated or have not yet reported but those numbers were also not provided. It’s unclear whether the data will be released. The Herald knows of four doctors who have not reported their vaccine status and who had their privileges suspended Wednesday.
The Herald also asked the Department of Health whether any action had been against doctors and whether the province would provide that information in their update later this week. By end of day we had received no response.
Katherine Fierlbeck, a Dalhousie University political science professor, says it's concerning that the province won’t provide vaccination status for doctors and nurses.
“Why not provide this information? Certainly, Dalhousie University was willing to disclose information on vaccination, as well as testing compliance for those refusing to vaccinate," said Fierlbeck.
Fierlbeck, an expert in health policy, said the importance of government transparency holds not only when governments have nothing to hide, but more importantly when there is information relevant to the public good that may affect the public directly.
“Refusing to disclose sensitive information, and refusing to explain why this information is withheld, suggests an attitude that the public is not able to handle this kind of information.”
The province is in short supply of doctors and nurses. As of Nov. 1, more than 81,000 people were waiting for a family physician, up by more than 60 per cent from a year earlier. In September, the Nova Scotia Nurses Union demanded action to address chronic staffing shortages that it said had been made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Herald asked whether Health Minister Michelle Thompson had a contingency plan to address possible shortages of doctors and nurses should they quit or be fired over the vaccine mandate. MacInnis suggested that hospitals and the health authority had their own contingency plans and the minister would not speak about another organization’s plan.
Fierlbeck said it’s the responsibility of the minister and the department of health to formulate broader strategic objectives and that means coming up with a contingency plan.
“When there is not absolute clarity in the division of roles and responsibilities between institutions, what can happen is that each body tries to offload responsibility for difficult decisions to the other, said Fierlbeck. “I would think hospitals are the least able to deal with this as a large, important strategic initiative.”
