Struggling to Vaccinate New York's Home Care Workers
In MedPage Today, HHWA Vice President Joe Pecora confronts the deficiencies posed by vaccine shortages and logistical challenges in meeting Home Care workers’ critical health needs.
"They're on the front line like other workers," said Joe Pecora, vice president of Home Healthcare Workers of America, a union with some 20,000 workers in New York.
Tragically, Pecora said, the union has lost more than a dozen home healthcare workers during the pandemic. "There's a need, there's a desire to get the vaccine," he said.
Pecora said he continues to call health departments multiple times a day to see if new shipments of the vaccine have come in. "Maybe I call too much?" he wondered.
As he waits for doses, the union is doing what it can to help its members get vaccinated, including through inoculation appointments at clinics that already provide their regular medical care, Pecora said. But as of the end of January, only about 2,000 of the union's members had been vaccinated.
Aside from supply shortages, there are logistical challenges. Unlike hospital-based workers receiving the vaccine at their place of work, or pharmacies descending upon nursing homes to inoculate staff on-site, there isn't a universal approach for reaching home healthcare workers, Noyes and Pecora noted. Frontline workers in the field are spread out across areas of service, are challenged to reschedule appointments, and spend much of their time taking public transportation to their next patient.