I rise with great pleasure to follow my colleague the member for Macedon to speak on the Health Services Amendment (Mandatory Vaccination of Healthcare Workers) Bill 2020. Before I begin I do want to give a really big shout-out to our incredibly hardworking Minister for Health in the other place. She has been working extremely hard over the past couple of weeks and months dealing with the health and wellbeing of Victorians in relation to the outbreak of coronavirus.
This is a commonsense bill that has been brought to the floor of Parliament with very practical measures to help protect our healthcare workers, staff and patients at a time when so many people within our community are seriously concerned about the outbreak of coronavirus. And let us remember, as the member for Macedon has just pointed out, we are also coming towards the beginning of flu season, so I thank the Minister for Health for her actions to protect the health and wellbeing of all Victorians, including me and my family.
Getting to this bill, this is a significant and important bill that makes amendments to our Health Services Act 1988 and the Ambulance Services Act 1986, amendments that are going to allow the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services to direct employers of healthcare workers in public health services and ambulance services across Victoria to require healthcare workers to be vaccinated against very specific vaccine-preventable diseases. These include settings such as public hospitals, denominational hospitals, private hospitals and ambulance services. It is a bill that makes amendments to the Health Services Act to permit the secretary to also give directions to private health service establishments, including private hospitals, requiring them to ensure that specified persons—their workers—are vaccinated against these diseases. The bill also provides that the secretary can suspend in full or part the registration of a health service establishment if it is not complying with his or her direction.
Upon reading this bill and really thinking about what is at the heart of it, the heart of it is our healthcare workers, who are very, very special people, across Victoria. They are at the very heart of our communities, and what we know is that they are at increased risk of vaccine-preventable diseases if they are not vaccinated. With our dedicated healthcare workers being protected through vaccination, we ourselves, our families and our loved ones are also protected because some of us are also the staff that work within the sector and some of us will be that sector’s patients, and many of us are likely to be more vulnerable than others.
A poorly vaccinated workforce creates both an occupational health and safety risk and a patient safety risk. Our health services are also at increased risk of disruption due to staff absences either from illness or exclusion as a quarantine measure. Vaccinations are safe and vaccinations save lives. As we start to approach flu season it is no surprise that the influenza vaccination is currently funded for staff working in health services and that the introduction of targets has seen a rise in healthcare worker influenza vaccination rates in recent years, peaking at 84 per cent in 2019. By mandating influenza vaccination for healthcare workers, along with vaccination for other important diseases such as whooping cough, measles and chickenpox, healthcare workers and their patients can be protected from these preventable diseases.
My mum works in the aged-care industry and she is currently looking after very elderly, vulnerable patients in local nursing homes. Every flu season she is a woman that rolls up her sleeve, grits her teeth and welcomes that little jab of goodness that will protect not only her from the flu but also the vulnerable locals she looks after. Year after year she tells me stories about how bad things can get inside those nursing homes when you have got elderly vulnerable people in close proximity to each other and someone there catches the flu. For those people it is a matter of life and it is a matter of death.
Having talked about my mum, I will say my dad is the local milkman back home. I do not get to talk about him a lot besides him being a big Labor man that delivers milk to all the local coffee shops, so he is basically what you would call an essential service. The milk run is a small business. And like many small business owners, Dad cannot afford to get sick because there is no-one else who can deliver the milk. Now this will not be footage that I will be putting up on Facebook, so I can say that Dad completely freaks out when it comes to needles. I am pretty sure that back in his younger days he was even known to get a bit woozy at the doctor’s surgery after being jabbed with a tetanus shot, usually after being bitten by other people’s household pets—most likely the dog—which you could say was always a hazard for any milkman that did the house run back in those days. So Dad is a man who basically baulks at any needles coming his way, but before every single flu season, every year, he gets his flu shot, and he does this because he knows the risk to the milk run—his small business and his livelihood—and he knows what happens if he does not look after his health.
In talking about this bill down in my office this afternoon one of my staff—and I am sure he is watching right now—told me about his mum. His mum became extremely ill with a lung disease and ended up needing a double lung transplant. He told me that every year he gets a flu shot, because with having a mother who was so sick and who has had that double lung transplant the risk of him catching the flu and passing it on to her would be absolutely deadly.
As a parent I am absolutely resolute on the need to immunise our kids. I come from an area in northern New South Wales where there have been so many outbreaks or re-emergences of preventable, almost dormant or non-existent diseases that have suddenly caught the community off guard. There have been years of anti-vaccination campaign messages, disgusting messages, and parents—and I hate saying this—had stopped immunising their kids. Next thing we know, low and behold, newborn babies and the vulnerable are suddenly at risk of having terrible, terrible diseases and illnesses. As the member for Macedon pointed out, it really is about protecting the herd, and unless the herd is fully vaccinated there is no protection. I can only hope that the anti-vax movement, that still seems to absurdly and strangely exist within the very fringes of our community, does hear the contributions made to this bill here in Parliament today, particularly the one made by the member for Eltham. It is a reality and a fact-checking exercise indeed.
I was certainly shocked to learn that currently in Victoria the department has guidelines for healthcare worker vaccinations, but there is no legislative mandate to enforce these guidelines. So when I think of vulnerable patients I think of newborn babies. From memory—and it has been a while—the first round of immunisations come at around six weeks of age. I will never forget watching a video of a newborn baby struggling to breathe because that child had contracted whooping cough. That image has stayed with me for the past nine and a half years, since my Emily was born. I remember that the video affected me so much that I stayed very close to home with my newborn bub for the first six weeks of her life.
Victoria is one of the few Australian jurisdictions that does not have a mandatory vaccination requirement for healthcare workers, so essentially the amendments in this bill will maximise compliance with already existing recommended vaccination policy, and it will improve the effectiveness of the program in protecting Victorian healthcare workers and patients. As I have said, healthcare workers are at the very heart of our communities. They are very special people. We know that they are at increased risk of vaccine-preventable diseases if they are not vaccinated. This is not a bill about us versus them. We are all better protected if all of us are vaccinated and immunised against terrible diseases and illnesses. We all have a role to play in our community in protecting those who are most at risk and most vulnerable, because we can never be sure if that person whose life is put at risk will be us, our child, a family member or a friend. I commend the bill to the house.
