Helen Haines (Indi, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Health and Aged Care. Minister, in three weeks time, on 17 September, residential aged-care workers cannot work unless they've had a vaccination. In my electorate, government data shows that one in three aged-care facilities have had less than 50 per cent of their staff vaccinated. This is alarming. Residential aged-care workers were meant to be at the front of the queue. Regional age-care services already struggle to find enough staff and we're heading towards a catastrophe. How will you fix this before 17 September so that our regional aged-care residents can be safe and cared for?

Greg Hunt (Flinders, Liberal Party, Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to thank the member for Indi. In fact, there has been extraordinary progress with the vaccination program in our residential aged-care facilities, both for our residents and for our workers. For our workers, the figure is now 76.9 per cent of workers. That's a consistent figure across the country in this process that we're seeing.

Right now, these programs are in place across the country and they include general practice access, state clinic access, Commonwealth vaccination clinic access and specialist hubs. And then, in particular, we also have inreach access. At this point in time we have a thousand on-site self-vaccination clinics which are either completed or underway. We have 670 self-vaccination clinics which involve our providers, and I have used the example of TLC, led by Lou Pascuzzi in Victoria, which has been a national leader on that front. We've had over 585 Commonwealth inreach clinics in residential aged-care facilities, and all of these are ongoing. Those could be by GPs or they could be by Commonwealth clinics—there are over 2,255 worker vaccination clinics.

These programs are continuing, and I went through this only yesterday with Operation COVID Shield with Lieutenant General Frewen. Their advice is very clear: they believe that they will be in a position to make sure that there is specific access, even though all workers have already had access through the general national program, and they are confident that we will be able to ensure that every worker who seeks to be vaccinated is. As we saw only yesterday, there was a near five per cent jump in that rate in one day. So we're continuing to see very high take-up.

I do want to thank these workers. They have helped to save lives and protect lives right through the pandemic. On the one hand we now have a 76.9 per cent vaccination rate for residential aged-care workers, and we also have a rate amongst the actual residents themselves now at 88.6 per cent. So that is continuing to grow; even though it's at an extraordinarily high level, it's continuing to grow. One of the things that's doing that is that we are going back and back again to families or to residents, where they're in the position to make the decision for themselves, to encourage them, to provide information and to support them on this.

These two things are working together to protect residents right around Australia. It explains the difference in outcomes between the terrible and catastrophic tragedies and loss of life that we saw in Victoria last year and the vastly different situation amongst residential aged-care facilities in New South Wales. Together, saving lives— (Time expired)