COVID-19 jab: QEH ‘ready’ to give staff shot

The Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH) is standing by to deliver the first doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to its over 2,000 workers on the COVID-19 frontline whenever it becomes available, the QEH’s Executive Chairman Juliette Bynoe-Sutherland has told Barbados TODAY.

She said that the hospital has put all systems in place to facilitate the roll-out of the vaccine.

Bynoe-Sutherland said: “We believe we can comfortably immunize the hospital staff over a period of seven days and we have developed a tentative schedule of departments focusing of course first on staff members at the isolation centres, Accident and Emergency Room, the Emergency Ambulance Service, all of our clinical departments across the length and breadth of the hospital; radiology, radiotherapy, and I can go on.”

This evening Prime Minister Mia Mottley and other authorities received 100,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine from the Government of India. The vaccine has already been rolled out in some of the world’s largest countries and is deemed to be “safe and suitable”.

Bynoe-Sutherland said she and the hospital’s management team would receive the jab after the frontline workers.

She said: “What we have done is prioritization where we focus first on our front line workers and we leave towards the backend, people who are not engaging directly with patients. Almost everybody at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH) is a frontline worker and there is a much smaller cohort of administrative staff.

“So I would say the vast majority of workers at the hospital are patient-facing, but there are a few of us who do not do as much patient engagement, so we will necessarily be in the queue behind others who are working directly with patients and the public.”

The doses are to be administered in the QEH’s auditorium which is currently being prepared, the hospital boss said. She explained that management was focused on the logistics of giving vaccines to 2,367 hospital employees, while at the same time, raising awareness and sensitizing staff members about the vaccine.

Bynoe-Sutherland told Barbados TODAY: “We would appreciate that because our staff members are clinical team members, that they would want a lot more detailed information that may not necessarily interest the public, but might necessarily interest clinical professionals. So we are making all of that detailed information ready.

“Our vaccine project is co-ordinated by retired senior public health Sonia Connell who is part of Dr [Elizabeth] Ferdinand’s team, who has been trained as part of the national programme. Sonia also happens to be a member of the board of directors, so she is in a position to both bring her knowledge of immunization, her professional knowledge, and experience, as well as her executive reach because she is a board member, for putting all the necessary arrangements in place. She is being assisted on an occupational level by Rosanna Lewis, our Occupational Health and Safety Officer.”
(anestahenry@barbadostoday.bb)