As newly-cleared COVID-19 vaccines reach hospitals around the country, health care leaders tasked with divvying up the shots among staff are all answering the same question at the same time: Who goes first?
this is easy: Janitors, Nurses, Doctors
These fuckups are appalling. It’s not as if they didn’t have months to plan for vaccine allocation.
I can see giving the vaccine to nurses, doctors, people who work directly with patients, food services, maintenance, cleaning and others at risk of catching covid and exposing patients, but the marketing department, insurance administration and other back room folks can come last as far as I am concerned. Most of the hospital executives are just as likely to work with patients as are marketing types, so they come last too.
Of course that is just me. My guess is the denizens of the executive suite at Stanford got theirs first.
You may recall that States have gotten a lot fewer initial doses than they had planned on.
Which means individual hospitals and medical facilities aren’t getting what they counted on either.
The order in which you vaccinate your employees has little to do with the count of doses you receive. Britain was working out and publishing vaccination priorities months ago.
Fortunately, not all hospital chains are fucking up like this; I know of one that is doing it right (ER doc buddy was one of the first to get vaccinated; lucky dog gets the dec 24-27 shift.)
One of my cousins who worked as a janitor at a local hospital in Lake county Il. had retired to do stuff.
With the covid restrictions he had nothing to do so he got his old job back to get out of the house. A week after he started the vaccine came out, he got a shot within days.
So it’s definitely a distribution problem if this hospital got it and vaccinated all staff while others have to ration.
Britain also did all that centrally, while our feds left it pretty much up to individual states and facilities. I’m sure overlooking the residents was a simple error that just didn’t get caught.
Who goes first. What’s on second. And third? I don’t know…
It is really very simple, unless the vaccine has prophylactic properties to prevent spread, the best and most ethical roll-out has to prioritize those who at the greatest risk of severe complications if they are infected.
Younger ER staff whining about not getting in the first wave is rather astonishing to me. Do they not see that the first goal here is to prevent as many serious and deadly infections as possible; to keep people out of hospitals?
@mattshuham, Not to be picky, but I am, it’s Washington University in St. Louis., or locally known as WashU.
And shouldn’t they have a plan for something like this, you know in a binder sitting on someone’s bookshelf? I mean hospital, virus, pandemic, and emergency plan all seem to go together.
I’m thinking that those that have the most and repeated exposure go first.
Which leads me back to an interview I heard with one of those traveling nurses. She stated that she had already had COVID, and she has no insurance. Who is making sure that those who are not a hospital employee but a contract worker are in the mix?
I would agree to their being progressively added in batches to the priority lists. Vaccinating too many at once could lead to serious staffing shortages resulting from sick effect induced sick days.
First goal, save as many lives as we can.
Second goal, reduce strain on hospitals
Third goal, vaccinate those at risk of high exposure
Fourth goal, teachers and school staff to lessen need to shutdown from student outbreaks
Lastly, everyone else
With the corporatization of hospitals, very few admins have a clinical background. Even fewer have patient encounters. (That’s part of what folks go into admin, avoiding patients). As such they are a low priority.
Orderlies, janitors, nurses, doctors.
Obviously federal politicians are first. It’s hard to believe rich people will wait their turn, especially if they gave money to a hospital. State politicians maybe.