Six fired at Hamilton Health Sciences over refusal to comply with COVID vaccine policy
Hamilton Health Sciences has fired six staff and disciplined 52 others before mandatory vaccines are even in place.
The hospital network is requiring its workforce of 13,250 to be fully vaccinated against COVID by Nov. 30.
In the meantime, staff must disclose their vaccination status. Education and twice-a-week testing are required for those who haven't had two COVID shots.
The staff who have been terminated or disciplined weren't complying with the reporting or testing requirements.
It comes one week after Burlington's Joseph Brant Hospital (JBH) announced that it fired 13 staff and put 38 more on unpaid leave as it became the first area hospital to enforce mandatory COVID vaccination.
We believe it is the right decision for JBH, to protect the safety of our patients, their loved ones, our teams and our community," JBH CEO Eric Vandewall said in a message to the community Nov. 10.
St. Joseph's Healthcare has a deadline of Dec. 14, Norfolk General Hospital in Simcoe and West Haldimand General in Hagersville are Jan. 4, while Niagara Health is Jan. 27.
Hamilton Health Sciences (HHS) said in a statement that more people are choosing to be vaccinated each day" as the Nov. 30 deadline approaches.
As of Tuesday, 12,577 of its staff were fully vaccinated - or about 95 per cent. The 673 left unvaccinated is down from 875 on Nov. 11 and 985 on Oct. 27.
Vaccination rates ... have risen steadily since we introduced these policies two months ago," said Vandewall about Joseph Brant.
While the holdouts are a small number, Hamilton's hospitals already have hundreds of unfilled job openings between them - St. Joseph's has around 161 vacancies while HHS has been as high as 300 during the pandemic.
HHS isn't back to doing surgeries at pre-pandemic levels because of shortages of specialized staff.
However, leaders at both Hamilton hospital networks dismissed concerns that vaccine mandates will exacerbate those shortages.
Neither Joseph Brant nor HHS provided information about where the terminated staff work and whether they are health-care workers.
Hospital leaders across the region came together in October to ask Ontario Premier Doug Ford to make COVID shots mandatory for all health-care workers calling it the single most important action that the government can take."
Ontario rejected a provincewide mandate to the dismay of many health organizations, including the Ontario Hospital Association, the Registered Nurses' Association of Ontario and the Canadian Medical Association.
Joanna Frketich is a Hamilton-based reporter covering health for The Spectator. Reach her via email: jfrketich@thespec.com