Shorter lineups at Toronto's H1N1 clinics
Last Updated: Monday, November 2, 2009 | 6:19 PM ET
CBC News
Toronto health officials are promising better organization this week to reduce scenes like this one where people lined up for hours for an H1N1 vaccine. (CBC) The lineups at Toronto's downtown H1N1 clinic were down to under an hour by Monday evening, with many of those waiting for a shot describing a far different situation from last week's chaos.
Health-care workers at the Metro Hall clinic in downtown Toronto handed out numbered wristbands to the roughly 500 people in line when the clinic opened at noon, indicating what hour people should come back for their shot.
Health officials hoped to vaccinate 100 people an hour.
Getting in line six hours early didn't seem to bother some people who brought their children, folding chairs, food and toys to help pass the time and make the wait a little more comfortable.
Natalie Worman arrived at 7 a.m. at the Metro Hall clinic with her daughter.
"They're making an effort to make sure that everybody stays inside, and my husband said that even when they were lined up outside before Metro Hall opened, they brought chairs outside," she told CBC News.
"So it seems like they're a little better prepared this week," she said.
David Mark, who came three hours before the Metro Hall clinic opened — which was an hour before schedule at noon — said health workers were checking to make sure everyone in line was in the high-risk group.
"They asked us a bunch of questions to make sure we fall into that priority group," he said. "I was here with my mother and she already had her season flu shot about two weeks and she has diabetes, but because she was over 65, she didn't qualify."
On Monday, 10 large clinics opened in Canada's largest city — but only for those people considered to be high risk of getting the virus.
Priority groups are:
- Pregnant women.
- Children from six months to five years of age.
- People who live with children under six months old.
- People under 65 with underlying medical conditions.
- Immuno-compromised people and those caring for them.
- People living in remote and isolated communities.
Late last week, after it became clear there would be a shortage of the H1N1 vaccine, a decision was made to restrict the shots to those people in the high risk groups. Others, health officials said, will have to wait a little longer.
"We've been asked by the provincial government to stick to the priority groups," Dr. David McKeown, Toronto's chief medical officer of health said Monday in an interview with CBC News.
"We recognize that that is going to cause some inconvenience if families come forward and only one or two members of the families fall into the priority groups. We're going to vaccinate those two and ask the others to be patient and wait."
'Relatively good shape'
Ontario Health Minister Deb Matthews said she was hopeful Toronto's clinics had learned a lesson from last week's long lines and the frustrated people who were forced to wait hours for a shot.
"We're in really good shape. I know it doesn't feel like it, but we're a week ahead of schedule getting the vaccine out. We've got three times as much vaccine on a per capita basis as they do in the United States. We are in relatively good shape and I hope that this week the clinics will operate much more efficiently," Matthews told CBC News.
McKeown said he was also confident things would operate more smoothly for a couple of reasons.
"We have enough vaccine this week to run our 10 large clinics across the city starting [Monday]. It's also important for people to know that we've spent the past few days pushing out quite a lot of vaccine — over 100,000 doses — to physicians' offices. There are several hundred [physicians] in the GTA — family practices, pediatric practices — who have vaccine," he said.
Both officials said the unexpected deaths in Ontario last week of a 13-year-old boy and a 10-year-old girl were probably the catalysts for the surge in demand for the flu shot.
"I think we were all surprised by how fast the pendulum swung," said Dr. McKeown. He said the Toronto public health department will be "better prepared to cope with lineups this week."
Matthews said Friday's announcement by the federal government that the shipments of flu vaccine would be sharply reduced this week because of a production problem caught her ministry off guard.
"We were very surprised on Friday to learn how little vaccine there would be available this week. We need to get more lead time," she said.
But Matthews could not say when the general public would be able to plan to be vaccinated.
"We've been told to expect [a] much larger shipment next week but we do not have that final number. So we're optimistic that we will have a significantly higher supply next week but until we know for sure we're going to have to develop contingency plans."
