Call for private sector to jab elderly home residents

A professor of respiratory medicine says the government needs to arrange outreach teams to vaccinate the elderly against Covid in nursing homes before outbreaks at the facilities overwhelm the medical system.

Kenneth Tsang from the Department of Medicine at the University of Hong Kong said one solution would be to use the private sector for vaccinations – given the strain on the public sector.

“Employment of highly-organised teams of doctors and nurses, who are well used to or experienced in giving vaccinations, is not easy – particularly from the public sector now,” he said.

“We see all the doctors and nursing colleagues in the HA [Hospital Authority] are under tremendous pressure… One simple solution may be to engage the private sector to work closely with the HA to form mixed teams or just the private teams to carry out such execution.”

Professor Tsang said nursing homes were a particular cause for concern because one infected person could cause the disease to spread like wild fire, given that infection control was very difficult.

He said there were about 75,000 elderly care home residents across the SAR, and that he didn’t think any health care system in the world could cope with them coming into the system rapidly.