Residential aged care providers are to be required to report how many of their staff have been vaccinated against COVID-19 to provide greater health security for aged care residents.
Minister for Health, Greg Hunt said My Aged Care was trailing a new online reporting tool to record weekly data from aged care providers.
“The data will assist Governments and aged care providers in understanding the current status of workforce vaccination, support public health measures on COVID-19 and inform any adjustments needed to support workers’ access to a COVID-19 vaccination,” Mr Hunt said.
“The tool records de-identified data on the total number of aged care workers at each aged care service and, of those, the number of workers who have received a first dose or who are fully vaccinated against COVID-19,” he said.
“It will help us understand the level of risk each aged care facility faces in the event of an outbreak and how we can best support those facilities and workers.”
Mr Hunt said approved providers could trial the new tool on My Aged Care’s website and familiarise themselves with the reporting format before it became a formal requirement on 15 June.
He said many aged care workers had been, and would be, vaccinated by their GP, or at Commonwealth and State vaccination clinics.
“The detailed information of how many workers are vaccinated is not captured when they are vaccinated at these sites,” he said.
“The choice to get vaccinated and to disclose this information is voluntary but we do hope the workforce gets behind this important initiative,” Mr Hunt said.
Minister for Aged Care Services, Senator Richard Colbeck said the steps for reporting workforce COVID-19 vaccinations was similar to those already in place for flu vaccinations.
“Residential aged care providers are very familiar with the process of recording staff vaccinations from their experience with mandatory record-keeping on flu vaccination; this will be an extension of that process,” Senator Colbeck said.
