Visiting nurses, many of whom are providing care inside the homes of COVID-19 positive patients, will now be able to get vaccinated in Massachusetts.
That's a change in state policy, which had initially excluded visiting nurses from the phase-1 category of "COVID-facing" healthcare workers who were given first priority for the vaccine.
"These patients in the home are pretty sick, especially the ones with COVID," said Patricia Joyce, a registered nurse with the VNA Care network. "And we see a great deal of COVID patients."
VNA Care says its nurses have cared for about 570 COVID-19 positive patients, and Joyce said she's currently caring for about 10 of them — doing everything from taking care of IVs to educating patients about their diabetes or heart failure.
"Our goal is to prevent them from going back in the hospital," she said.
Visiting nurses are at a greater risk for contracting COVID-19, she said, because providing care inside people's homes means entering an uncontrolled environment. Unlike hospitals, there's little control of who's coming and going and what precautions are taken.
And unlike the nurses in hospitals, visiting nurses weren't given access to the vaccine until now. Initially, the state's priority list placed visiting nurses after congregate care settings in the timeline for vaccination. That timeline estimated those vaccinations would begin in February.
Visiting nurses have been calling state officials asking for a higher prioritization. The COVID Command Center and Department of Public Health reviewed the timeline, in collaboration with the state's COVID Advisory Group, and decided to move visiting nurses up on the priority list.
Pat Kelleher, executive director of the Homecare Alliance of Massachusetts, was notified of the change Friday.
"We're pleased that our nurses are now able to get vaccinated," Kelleher said. "It may seem like a small difference, two or three weeks, but it's a big deal to these nurses who have been out there serving COVID-positive patients and, sort of, not being recognized as COVID-facing workers."
Kelleher said visiting nurses can now go to the mass vaccination site at Gillette Stadium, which began vaccinating people on Friday.
"So I think those two things came together — a realization of what home health professionals were doing to help COVID and the opening of this super-site that has the ability to vaccinate so many people in a day."
Vaccinating visiting nurses presents a logistical challenge, since an agency's staff could be spread out across the state. Kelleher said she's hoping that hospitals that refer patients to visiting nurse agencies will begin vaccinating those visiting nurses once they've finished with their own work forces. Several visiting nurse agencies have applied to the state to be permitted to administer vaccines, Kelleher said. She hoped they may be able to administer vaccine to their own staffs and nurses from other agencies.
Home care workers providing non-medical care are not included in the change, and some in that industry say they're just as vulnerable and should be vaccinated now, too
"The work that these aides are doing is really just as critical as any of the work being done by anybody who is ahead of them in this phase-1 timeline," said Kevin Smith, president of the Home Care Aide Council and CEO and owner of Best Of Care, which employs about 400 home care workers. "This group needs to get vaccinated very soon, because they are the ones who are actually keeping people from crowding the hospitals. The work they're doing is keeping people safe at home. And the people they're helping are really incredibly vulnerable."
