Outreach Vaccination Arrangement for RCHs under COVID-19 Vaccination Programme starts
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Outreach teams and visiting medical officers (VMOs) will visit the first batch of 10 RCHs for the elderly that are participating in the outreach arrangement, which provides free vaccination services at the RCHs for their residents and service users of the day service units attached to the premises of the RCHs who have agreed to receive a vaccination and have been assessed by medical doctors as suitable for receiving a vaccination.
Details of the outreach vaccination arrangement are as follows:
(i) Administration of the BioNTech vaccine: The Hospital Authority (HA) will conduct site inspections and assessments, and send outreach vaccination teams (outreach teams) to administer the vaccine for suitable residents who have agreed to receive vaccinations at the RCHs; and
(ii) Administration of the Sinovac vaccine: The VMOs participating in the Residential Care Home Vaccination Programme of the Department of Health (DH) will administer the vaccine for suitable residents who have agreed to receive vaccinations at the RCHs.
The Social Welfare Department (SWD) has provided guidelines on the workflow to RCHs participating in the outreach arrangement to help them make necessary preparations, including preparing residents' information such as their clinical history and health conditions, to enable both the outreach teams and VMOs in assessing participating residents' suitability for receiving the vaccines based on the recommendations of the scientific committees under the Centre for Health Protection and taking into account clinical judgments and residents' health conditions on the day of vaccination.
The SWD, through the RCHs, has earlier collected information about residents' or their legal guardians' own choices as to whether they will participate in the outreach arrangement and what type of vaccine to receive, and has passed such information to the HA and the DH to make follow-up arrangements.
Residents who choose not to participate in the outreach vaccination arrangement will not be vaccinated in the RCHs, but they can still make bookings by themselves and receive a vaccination at Community Vaccination Centres or other locations.
The Government will consolidate experiences gained from the outreach vaccination arrangement for the first 10 RCHs for the elderly and extend the arrangement to the rest of around 1 100 institutions in Hong Kong in an orderly manner, including RCHs for the elderly, RCHs for persons with disabilities and nursing homes.
Ends/Tuesday, April 13, 2021
Issued at HKT 15:15
Issued at HKT 15:15
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