B.C. auditor general says there were gaps in COVID-19 vaccination information
Posted February 16, 2023 3:01 pm.
Last Updated February 16, 2023 3:02 pm.
B.C.’s auditor general is looking into how the province estimated vaccine rates over the last few years and says there is room for improvement.
Auditor General Michael Pickup says that overall, there was enough information sent to officials to keep track of how many people were being vaccinated, but he admits there were some gaps in the count for high-risk groups and staff.
“Our audit confirmed that the ministry did indeed have the information it needed to monitor COVID vaccination rates, with some exceptions related to higher-risk groups. We found the ministry shared this information efficiently with decision-makers,” he said.
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Pickup says reporting processes for people in long-term care and assisted living facilities were “cumbersome,” and in some cases, officials needed to use manual processes to estimate vaccine rates.
Although a document from the auditor’s office says that B.C.’s vaccination program prioritized the vaccinations of high-risk groups, the auditor general says the count for how many people were vaccinated was “unreliable.”
“The ministry monitored vaccination rates for long-term care and assisted living residents and staff. However, there is no centralized registry for them. Therefore, in some cases, data collection had to be done manually, which meant estimates for those groups could have been inaccurate. And the ministry monitored vaccination rates for health care workers, but there were gaps in this information.”
Pickup says he has made two recommendations to the Ministry of Health, which have been accepted, to help improve their data collection efforts, including improving data monitoring for people in long-term care facilities.
-With files from Robyn Crawford