B.C.’s provincial health officer has lifted a pandemic-related order around the collection of vaccine status information for health-care workers, but that doesn’t mean unvaccinated staff will be allowed to return to work.
Dr. Bonnie Henry on Friday repealed an order that required health professional regulatory colleges to obtain vaccination status data about their registrants. The repealed order also allowed regulatory colleges to share vaccination status with post-secondary institutions.
“It is noteworthy that the post-secondary institutions have instituted mechanisms to collect information directly from their health sciences students (and for medical residents, trainees and fellows in the case of UBC), making the continuation of those provisions unnecessary,” Henry’s office said in a statement on Monday.
She added that the repeal does not affect the requirements of health-care-system employers and post-secondary institutions to collect, use and disclose vaccination status information of their employees and students under provincial health officer orders directed at hospital, community care and residential care service providers.
Henry’s office says the order was lifted because regulatory colleges were required to submit a third snapshot of vaccination status data by July 14.
With a “comprehensive understanding of the vaccination status and its trends” in each health care profession, the province was able to end the current order as it “moves forward with policy work to establish a replacement system,” it said
The statement says each college will determine how to handle the collected vaccine information.
B.C. is currently the only province that has not allowed unvaccinated health care workers back on the job. Some provinces, like Nova Scotia and Ontario, have left it up to individual hospitals and employers to determine their vaccine policies.
