On March 16, premier Iain Rankin announced that hundreds of vaccines will soon be going to people staying in shelters in HRM. “We’ll be providing vaccine early April to about 300 people in the Halifax area who are in homeless shelters,” he said at Tuesday’s regular COVID-19 briefing with top doc Robert Strang. “We’ll also offer vaccine to people who work and volunteer in these shelters.”
According to the Affordable Housing Association of Nova Scotia there are an estimated 421 unhoused people living in HRM, 329 of whom are defined as “chronically homeless,” meaning it’s been more than six months.
The province didn’t say exactly which shelters it’s partnered with, but a post from the department of health and wellness says there are seven partner shelters, and that another 600 vaccines will go to shelter volunteers and employees. Rankin credits the Mobile Outreach Street Health team at the North End Community Health Centre with playing a big part in bringing this to fruition.
“Once again, community partnerships are proving critical to getting this job done,” he said. “Homeless shelters were initially included in Phase 2 of our rollout but have been moved ahead given they are a vulnerable group who are more at risk.”
Strang said that public health and other partners are targeting the first week of April to begin the vaccines: “People in the shelters will get their first dose and then we’ll work with the organizations to make sure everyone gets a chance for a second dose in four months.”
The premier said more people in shelters will be able to access the vaccine if offered now, rather than in the late spring or summer, because “these individuals use shelters more in colder months.”
This is one of the province’s few deviations from its age-based vaccine rollout plan. Strang cautioned the public again on Tuesday that people with specific occupations or health conditions wouldn’t be able to skip the line–this is for a multitude of reasons including the complications with online booking.
“How do you actually validate that they have this occupation or this medical condition? And you’re doing that multiple times, what that does is actually slows down your ability to get people into clinics.”
The few hundred doses at shelters will be administered differently than the vaccines for those aged 80+, which get injected at official clinics or prototype community clinics, and from those 63 and 64-year-olds, who will receive the AstraZeneca vaccine at 25 doctor’s offices and pharmacies across the province. “We’re also trying a new delivery method with shelters–a mobile van,” said Rankin.
The mobile unit will allow vaccines to travel to each shelter with trained staff to administer the doses, and Rankin says it will be a “key piece” of the province’s arsenal as it moves forward. Strang called the mobile clinics “the final piece in our vaccine delivery puzzle,” and in the past has said they could be used for community care settings and vaccinating people in more remote communities.
“These mobile units will help us reach very specific groups in more accessible ways,” Strang said. “Once we have worked through the shelters and learned how we use those effectively in the shelters, we’ll be looking at how we use them for other specific populations where access is a significant issue, in the weeks and months ahead.”
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This article appears in Mar 1-31, 2021.
