Public flu vaccination program a success without doctors, Haggie insists

The health minister says this flu season's vaccination program was a success because more people got flu shots this year compared with last year, even though the province stopped paying doctors to give them.

John Haggie says 20 per cent of people in Newfoundland and Labrador were vaccinated during the 2016-17 flu season. Already this year, during the '17-18 season, more than 22 per cent of people in the province had been vaccinated by the end of March.

"It went very well compared with previous years," he said. "We've administered more than 116,000 doses as of the end of March. Last year 105,000 doses were administered."

That number included people who received flu shots from their physicians as part of a regular office visit but it doesn't include people who paid for a flu shot at a pharmacy.

In 2017, the province announced it would stop paying doctors a fee each time they give a patient a flu shot. Instead, health officials set up a mass public vaccination program with shots administered by nurses.

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At the time, doctors said it was a bad idea, arguing many of their patients rely on them to do flu shot clinics. Without the clinics, warned doctors, many people wouldn't get shots, more people would get sick, and some might even die.

Confirmed flu cases up

Health officials says there have been more flu cases and more flu-related deaths in 2017-18 compared with the previous year.

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Dr. Claudia Sarbu, chief medical officer of health for Newfoundland and Labrador, said there were 50 per cent more confirmed cases of the flu this season compared with last year, and the number of flu-related deaths this year more than doubled: 33 this season versus 14 last year.

The flu shot was a mismatch.- Claudia Sarbu

But Sarbu says those numbers aren't up because people didn't get the flu shot. She says those increases happened because the strain of flu that spread in the province this year was particularly powerful and the shot that people received didn't work.

"This year the flu shot was a mismatch. So studies have shown that the current vaccine effectiveness against the H3N2 strain was only 17 per cent," said Sarbu.

"When we see this strain we should expect that the cases are more severe, we have more hospitalizations, and therefore we will see more deaths."

Not about costs

Haggie said the government hasn't done a cost analysis of the public vaccination program yet but added the physicians's flu shot fee wasn't eliminated to save money.

Instead, he said, the goal was to change doctors' scope of practice, to encourage them to do things that only they are trained to do and have other health providers, such as nurses, take some tasks off their plates, such as administering flu shots.

Haggie says changing how flu shots are administered is just one of many similar changes that are coming.

"We'll be introducing midwifery in central Newfoundland over the course of the fall. We have nurse-practicioners who can help out with routine management of primary care — taking some of the workload off physicians's shoulders."

Hoping to hike vaccination rate

Despite this year's increase, fewer than 25 per cent of people in Newfoundland and Labradors receive flu shots annually.

Haggie says that's much too low and he'd like to see the influenza vaccination increased to more than above 70 per cent of the population.

He says the problem isn't the availability of flu shots but that people don't want to get them.