Sarnia and Petrolia hospital workers will faces progressive discipline unpaid leave and could be fired without COVID-19 shots

Move is in concert with southwestern Ontario hospitals

Hospitals in southwestern Ontario, including Bluewater Health, are expecting all staff and volunteers who walk through the doors to be vaccinated.

Bluewater Health, Chatham-Kent Health Alliance, Windsor Regional Hospital, Hotel Dieu Grace and Erie Shores Health Care released a statement Friday morning saying they have “agreed to implement a progressive plan to ensure that all employees, credentialed
staff and volunteers…will be subject to progressive policies beyond mandatory education and testing, leading to unpaid leave and/or termination for cause.

“Mandatory vaccination for new staff will also be implemented by all hospitals to
support this effort.”

The news release adds medical exemptions will be honoured.

Mike Lapaine, the CEO of Bluewater Health, says it’s clear Ontario is in the fourth wave and vaccines are the best protection.

“Our staff, frankly, are quite tired. Our staff has been through a tough 18 months, and just the mere prospects of a fourth wave is is unsettling for many of us. So we want to ensure that every layer of safety we can put in place is in place, and we believe vaccines is a very important one of those layers,” he tells The Independent.

And Lapaine says it is important for the hospitals be a safe place.

“We are an institution that receives and cares for people when they’re the most vulnerable, when they when they’re critically ill and we believe that we have an obligation to follow the precautionary principle and use every everything at our disposal to ensure we’re there when people need us to be there. And we strongly believe that vaccines have shown they’re very effective at curbing severe illness, and that our staff and the patients being treated by our staff should expect our staff to be fully vaccinated,” says Lapaine.

Hospitals have been losing employees as the pandemic rolls on, mostly because of burnout. Lapaine believes this new policy will not make things worse.

“I think we need to understand that that that whole core group is is really in the minority. And we’re basically following the science,” he says.

“I would also be concerned if one of our staff has contracted COVID and particularly the Delta … they’re often ill for quite some time, which takes them out of the workforce as well so, there’s two sides to that. We do not want to lose staff through illness and we yes, we are risking that some staff may leave. That will be a choice that they will have to make.”

While he doesn’t have exact numbers yet, Lapaine says the vaccination rate among staff is very high. Chief of Staff Dr. Mike Haddad said on social media Thursday night that 95 per cent of physicians at the hospitals in Sarnia and Petrolia have already been fully vaccinated adding they all want to do their best to avoid hospitals overflowing with patients.

“We don’t want to go through that again or see anyone get that sick. We also don’t want to see any care displaced for anyone due to system strain. We can mitigate the impact of a fourth wave, but we’re at risk still. The misinformation hurts everyone in a finite shared health system.”

Lapaine says while the public may not be paying attention to the COVID-19 trends now “I think it’s going to become very real for people in the next couple of months.

“We also know that people are quite fatigued with lockdowns and so anything we can do to avoid lockdowns is critical and lockdowns are usually generated by hospitals becoming overwhelmed with seriously ill patients. And what we also know and have real world evidence to support is that the vaccines are very, very effective in preventing severe illness should someone contract COVID.”