Don’t link healthcare to vaccination status, say doc, nurse

Leading healthcare professionals have insisted that they would not support preferential treatment for patients who are vaccinated against COVID-19.

That caution from Medical Association of Jamaica (MAJ) President Dr Brian James and Nurses Association of Jamaica (NAJ) President Patsy Edwards came a day after Prime Minister Andrew Holness declared in Parliament that the unvaccinated would have to bear the consequences of their actions as the health sector could not continue to bear the cost of service.

The new policy directive would involve fixing bedspace quotas and other resources for COVID-19 care, the prime minister said - an apparent paradigm shift from the near-wholesale repurposing of supplies and infrastructure for coronavirus patients during spikes.

Edwards said that she would not agree with the prioritisation of patients beyond the established protocols of triage that apply when visitors turn up at health centres and hospitals.

The trade union leader said that her oath and pledge bound her to care for persons regardless of sex, religion, “or any other orientation”.

“We can’t turn away anyone who comes for healthcare because they are vaccinated or not vaccinated. I don’t know of us doing that. I work at Victoria Jubilee and if a woman comes and she is in labour, I am going to ask her if she is vaccinated or not vaccinated before giving her optimal care? No!” said the NAJ president.

Nurses have chafed at the increased workload that the pandemic has imposed on healthcare staff, citing punishing man-hours and untenable conditions in oversubscribed wards that have spilled into driveways and parking lots.

Edwards has also lost several nurses to COVID-19, adding to the grief.

Hundreds of nurses called in sick in protest over working conditions in August.

James, who said he had not heard the prime minister’s speech, was equally resistant to the notion of healthcare delivery on the basis of COVID-19 vaccination status.

“It is clearly not our practice to discriminate between how one set of patients behave versus how another set behave. They are treated according to the symptoms that they present with, the circumstances of their illness and the resources that are available.

“It has nothing at all to do with whether or not they have followed a particular set of instructions. So there is no way that we would be able to treat people on the basis of whether or not they are vaccinated,” the MAJ president told The Gleaner.

In his presentation to the House of Representatives on Tuesday, Holness lamented the multibillion-dollar spend on the expansion of health services during the swell of hospitalisations during three waves of COVID-19. That has led to the withdrawal of elective surgery and other non-emergency services for those with chronic illnesses as bedspace and other resource were channelled into coronavirus mitigation care.

“The Government will ultimately have no choice but to allocate a finite set of resources to managing COVID-19-related hospitalisations, including a fixed number of beds,” Holness said.

“We cannot continue to dedicate virtually the entire capacity of the health system to dealing only with COVID-19 to the detriment of other health system users.”

He lamented that significant scarce resources were being spent to treat persons in hospitals who have contracted COVID-19, of which 98.6 per cent were unvaccinated.

“As we move into the post-COVID phase and we remove the measures that have kept you safe, you will have to make decisions about your health,” the prime minister told his parliamentary colleagues, adding that the measures to contain the spread of COVID-19 were never intended to be long term and would soon come to an end.

“My conscience is clear on the vaccination matter. I have gone the length and breadth. I have preached the word. It is now for the people to make their decision,” the prime minister said.