Burnaby Deer-Lake MLA Kathy Corrigan is accusing the province’s health minister of using “weasel words” while answering questions about a Fraser Health decision to cut flu clinics at Burnaby senior centres.
The health authority cancelled its annual clinics at senior centres this year to focus resources on children under five and on people who use nasal-spray flu vaccines – two groups that can’t be served by pharmacies.
That move prompted complaints from a Burnaby seniors advocacy group, Voices of Burnaby Seniors (VOBS), who wrote a letter to Fraser Health interim board chair Wynne Powell on Nov. 6, calling on him to reinstate the clinics.
The health authority has directed seniors to get shots at their doctors’ offices or local pharmacies, but the letter argues many seniors don’t have GPs, and pharmacies may not provide a private, age-friendly space for the shots.
“Because of transportation for seniors, which is really totally inadequate, many won’t go now. That’s the problem,” VOBS member Elsie Dean told the NOW. “It was easy for seniors to get to their centre and get the flu shot.”
Dean has gotten vaccinated at the Confederation seniors centre clinic for about eight years, but she said she wouldn’t get a shot if it meant waiting in a supermarket or drug store while shoppers stroll by.
“I wouldn’t do it,” she said. “I wouldn’t get a flu shot.”
Brenda Felker, another VOBS member, said she’s done it but won’t go back.
“I wouldn’t do that again,” she said. “I wouldn’t sit in the Safeway like that. You’re sitting in front of the pharmacy and people are lined up. I didn’t enjoy the experience at all.”
Fraser Health has said senior centres could bring in pharmacies to put on clinics in place of the Fraser Health-run vaccinations, but Mary Horton, president of the Bonsor 55+ Society, said her centre has always avoided political and corporate endorsements.
She also doubts the pharmacies would provide the same level of service as Fraser Health.
“A pharmacy is going to send you maybe two people at most, and then you’re going to have a long lineup,” she said.
Horton said she was “absolutely taken aback and surprised” by Fraser Health’s decision to cut the clinics.
NDP opposition leader John Horgan questioned Health Minister Terry Lake about the cancelled seniors clinics Tuesday in the B.C. Legislature, and Lake appeared to promise a reversal of Fraser Health’s decision.
“We will ensure that Fraser Health is doing clinics for seniors for influenza vaccine,” Lake said during question period.
But in an email statement Wednesday, Lake told the NOWFraser Health would only reconsider co-ordinating flu clinics at centres that did not have access to nearby pharmacy-run clinics.
And, as of Wednesday, Fraser Health hadn’t reinstated any of the cancelled seniors clinics.
“For the moment, this has not been necessary,” spokesperson Tasleem Juma said.
Corrigan, who had taken Lake’s words in the Legislature as a “very, very clear reversal” and an NDP victory, said she was “baffled” that nothing had changed for Burnaby seniors.
“I would say that the minister was using weasel words because that is not what we understood from what he said,” she said.
