HALIFAX -- Shawn Challner has felt nervous ever since his wife became one of a number of health-care workers in Nova Scotia reassigned to a COVID-19 unit before becoming fully vaccinated.

While he says he recognizes vaccination is one tool out of many for preventing the transmission the virus, he thinks it's one her employer, Nova Scotia Health, should be using.

"I think it should be front and center that they should be getting their second doses," he says.

Challner says his spouse isn't the only health-care worker on the frontlines of the pandemic without both doses of vaccine, and he's not happy with her employer's response.

"To be told by the hospital that vaccinations aren't required to work on the COVID unit, that PPE is enough protection," he says, "I really disagree with that."

Health-care workers started getting their first vaccine doses back December in Nova Scotia, but the unions which represent 24,000 of them say what began as a priority based rollout – didn't turn out that way.

"Once it rolled out to everybody in Nova Scotia," says NSGEU president Jason MacLean, "it was cancelled for the prioritization of workers in the facilities."

MacLean says even when prioritized booking was available to his members, many had trouble getting an appointment, despite trying multiple times.

With COVID-19 hospitalizations rising in the province's third wave began, staff are being redeployed there to help with the increased workload.

MacLean says he knows of members working in COVID-19 units who only have one vaccine dose, along with none at all.

He wants NS Health to take a different approach to meeting staffing pressures.

"Which would mean, people that are vaccinated with their two doses would be first asked to go in, and then ask the people with one, and then if you have to put people in, you put up the people who have not been vaccinated at all," says MacLean. "But you have to give people a fighting chance."

The head of the Nova Scotia Nurses' Union says staff who feel unsafe shouldn't have to work in a COVID unit.

"If nurses and others are uncomfortable, there should be a serious look at is there another unit that they could go to and we could transfer another person that is fully vaccinated," says Janet Hazelton.

Hazelton says workers now do have a special access link to use if they still need a first dose of the vaccine.

"Second vaccine, those that had their first that weren't in Level 1, those individuals would have their dates in July."
Tuesday, four health care unions – the NSGEU, the NSNU, CUPE, and Unifor – sent a message to their members, describing what they should do if they are assigned to a COVID unit.

"People without any vaccinations who do not wish to be re-assigned to a COVID unit should only be re-assigned as a last resort," it reads in part. "Health care workers who do not have a second vaccination and who work with COVID patients should be provided the second vaccination immediately."

Nova Scotia Health says the age-based vaccine program targeting health care workers led to more than 43,000 registrations.

But the health authority says it doesn't know how many of those were fully or partially vaccinated.

It says the priority-access program ceased near the end of April when the vaccination age started dropping for all Nova Scotians.

"That all-age rollout, we worked through and we immunized right up to the cut-off … so we really immunized down to the 20-plus age group," says Nova Scotia Health's provincial director of occupational health, safety, and wellness.

"Then we actually removed that registration process because the community age rollout was lowering at the same rate, and essentially health care workers were going to intersect with their … eligibility with the community-based roll out," says Angela Keenan.

Keenan says using proper PPE and following infection prevention control measures have kept staff safe, saying workplace transmission in health care facilities has been "very low."

"The personal protective equipment the multiple strategies to support the provision of safe patient care are in place from the employer's perspective." Keenan adds.

That's not good enough for Shawn Challner.

"I just want them to be as safe as they possibly can right now," he says. He thinks if the vaccine supply is good – health-care workers who need their vaccines should get it now, especially if they are working on a COVID-19 unit.

He says he'll feel better about his wife's protection when she gets her second shot July 3 – which he says also happens to be the last day she's scheduled to work on the COVID unit.