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both the quebec and ontario government’s read on vaccine mandates is that forcing healthcare staff to be vaccinated will cause a crippling exodus of “potentially tens of thousands of healthcare workers,” according to premier doug ford, which will delay important diagnoses and surgeries. he said this despite being told by hospital ceos, healthcare organizations and medical officers of health back in mid-october that they were seeing numbers well below that.
hospitals like ontario’s london health sciences centre (lhsc) which has had mandates in place since october that require all staff to be vaccinated has had to fire just 84 employees for failing to meet its vaccine requirement. others, like the queensway carleton hospital in ottawa, reported 37 unvaccinated employees on leave; cornwall community hospital said it expected to place 33 staff members on leave; and hotel-dieu grace healthcare in windsor, ontario fired 24 employees for not complying with its vaccination policy. all the hospitals reported that the numbers were low enough not to impact patient care.
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thankfully, in addition to the commitment of most hospitals to uphold vaccine mandates, there has been a steady stream of patient and healthcare worker-friendly statements from industry associations like the canadian medical association (cma), which issued a statement expressing disappointment over ontario and quebec’s decision not to require healthcare workers to be vaccinated. the head of the registered nurses’ association of ontario (rnao) doris grinspun called the decision “a disgrace to patients and to the great majority of healthcare workers who desperately are supporting mandatory vaccination.” and the ontario hospital association (oha) reported “a strong consensus among ontario’s hospitals for a provincial policy requiring healthcare workers to be fully vaccinated”— noting that 120 of its 141 member hospitals supported the move.
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