People with disability are more likely to feel unsafe in Queensland health institutions and may even avoid them after the state launched plans to drop its vaccine mandate for health staff, according to an advocacy group.
Nicole Lee, president of People with Disability Australia, said Queensland had been a leader in Covid protections and she had hoped the state might make the mandate permanent.
Even a cold or flu – an inconvenience for someone else – can leave her “seriously unwell” and Lee said she believed it was not unreasonable to ask nurses and doctors to get one jab a year to reduce the risk.
“I’d like people to come and live in somebody’s shoes who is at high risk of serious complications from the flu or Covid,” she said.
“And to live a day or a week or a month in our lives of what it’s like to be worried about engaging with the community around you.”
“We’re taking every possible step to protect ourselves, it would be nice to see other people taking sensible measures to also protect us.”
The state government announced plans on Friday to kick off consultation on ending employee Covid-19 vaccination requirements, after an assessment by the chief health officer, Catherine McDougall, that the requirement was no longer clinically necessary.
Consultation will run until 18 September and the health directive would be repealed on 25 September, two years after it went into force. Until then the mandate remains in effect.
The health minister, Shannon Fentiman, said the decision was made on the basis of advice from Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation, among other expert groups.
“We will now let the consultation process with relevant stakeholders run its course before making a final decision,” she said.
Fentiman said the state was now treating coronavirus vaccination “pretty similarly to influenza”.
Queensland Health staff have long been required to be vaccinated against a variety of ailments, including hepatitis, chickenpox and measles. But the flu vaccine is only recommended, not mandated.
Assoc Prof Paul Griffin, an infectious disease physician and clinical microbiologist at the University of Queensland, said the step was an appropriate one, but the government needed to strengthen other protections such as masking to maintain community confidence.
He said part of the reason the health system didn’t require flu vaccination was because the jab wasn’t as effective in preventing transmission as the rubella vaccine.
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“The other one is that the magnitude of the risk in the community and in our hospitals, it’s less than it was certainly at the start of widespread community transmission,” he said.
“This doesn’t mean that those sorts of rules may not be required again in the future.”
Queensland Health is hoping some of the 1,200 staff terminated as a result of the mandate since November 2021 will return. Another 1,000 resigned, representing about 1% of the workforce.
“Now, not all of those staff that resigned will have resigned because of our vaccine mandate,” Fentiman said. “That gives you an idea of how many staff might now want to reapply to come back to work in Queensland Health.”
Former registered nurse Gene – who didn’t want to give her last name – was laid off two days before Christmas last year because she wouldn’t get vaccinated. The 40-year veteran said she had no intention of going back to the Queensland Health hospital where she worked.
She said “it’s wonderful” the government has dropped the mandate, but said many of the laid off workers will make the same choice.
“It will be wonderful for a lot of people. But, you know, people will go back wondering what the next thing will be,” she said.
The Nurses Professional Association of Queensland (NPAQ) – a competitor with the nurses union that emerged during the pandemic and led a test case unsuccessfully challenging the mandate – said dropping the mandate would help reduce staff shortages.
There are also several unvaccinated workers who are still facing disciplinary hearings and can’t be dismissed until their matters are heard.