[Music, and slide with text: Supporting people with disability to access COVID-19 vaccination. An interview with NDIS provider Achieve Australia.]
RICKY KREMER: My name is Ricky Kremer. I work for the Council of Intellectual Disability.
I'm here with Jo-Anne Hewitt. Jo-Anne Hewitt is the CEO for Achieve Australia. We're going to talk about COVID-19 vaccination and how Achieve has supported clients with disability to get vaccinated. Why is it important that providers continue to support COVID-19 vaccination for their clients with disability?
JO-ANNE HEWITT: Well, Ricky, that's a great question because at the moment, you know, we know that COVID-19 is much more prevalent in the community and at the same time many of the mandated restrictions have now been lifted. But it's actually more important than ever to ensure that people with disability and people around them are up to date with their vaccinations. We know that people with disability are more vulnerable to underlying conditions and so therefore more vulnerable to the impacts of COVID-19. And so keeping people up to date, ensuring that people are up to date, ensuring that their supporters, family members, staff are up to date with their vaccines – really important to keep people safe and well. But also to avoid people having to continue to lock down and stay socially isolated.
[Slide with text: Strategies to help people access vaccination]
RICKY KREMER: How has Achieve helped clients with disability to be vaccinated?
JO-ANNE HEWITT: One of the key ways is to actually make sure that people have the right information. So to keep them up to date with the vaccines that are available and where, keep them up to date with things like what the efficacy and side effects of vaccines are, make sure that they have access to vaccines via helping them to actually get there. So in the early days of the vaccine availability, we set up some accessible clinics and actually helped people to get to those clinics. They were provided with transport. We made sure that we also had mobile clinics so that people who couldn't go out for some reason were able to get their vaccination at home. And we opened those clinics up to families, to friends, and to staff members so that everyone around the person had the opportunity to be fully vaccinated.
[Slide with text: The right to choose]
RICKY KREMER: So people have the right to choose whether they want to get vaccinated. How did you balance promoting vaccination with the need to respect decisions made by clients?
JO-ANNE HEWITT: Absolutely, people have the right to make their own decisions about things that impact them and in particular things that impact their health and well-being. So what we did was make sure that people had the right information to make a really good informed choice and made sure that that information was in a range of formats that were accessible to people with disability. We also made sure that the people around them had that information as well. So I think it was really ensuring that we were persistent in the message to people about the importance of vaccines. With our staff, they too had the right to choose because they have the right to choose what happens to their own health and their own bodies. But you know, most people actually decided to get the vaccine and I know now that the majority of our clients and all of our staff are vaccinated.
[Slide with text: Supporting people in different settings]
RICKY KREMER: Was your approach different for clients living in supported accommodation compared to those clients in private accommodation?
JO-ANNE HEWITT: Not really. In some ways, it was easier to support people in supported accommodation because our staff are there and working with them on a day-to-day basis. So it was easy to get the information out and easier also to get them to the right place or to bring the vaccine to them. But we made sure that everyone that we support had that access to either the information or the vaccine, whether or not they were in our supported accommodation or not.
[Slide with text: Vaccination is more than just a health issue]
RICKY KREMER: So are there any other messages you would share with other providers who are trying to promote and support vaccination for people with disability?
JO-ANNE HEWITT: Ricky, I think one of the key things that I've certainly been promoting in my organisation and to the people that I support and their staff is that this is not just a health issue but it's also an issue about people's exclusion and isolation from the community. The more people feel fearful or they're vulnerable to waves of COVID, the less they can go out and do the things they want to do, go to work, enjoy their access to the community, be with their friends, be with their family. So really, this is a social justice issue as much as it's a health issue. I think that message needs to be front and centre in everything we do, that it really is about the rights of people with disability to be safe, well, and to be part of their community.
RICKY KREMER: Absolutely.
[Music, and slide with text: Thank you to Achieve Australia and the Council for Intellectual Disability. Further resources can be found on the Department of Health and Aged Care website]