Vaccine status of one in four COVID-19 patients in Canberra hospitals unknown

Record keeping methods also failed to properly record the death of one man with COVID-19 in ACT Health's internal systems.

Documents released to The Canberra Times have revealed significant gaps in data collection from the territory's health authorities.

It came after The Canberra Times revealed on Wednesday that health officials blocked the public release of information around patient comorbidity data despite knowing it was "an important part of the picture".

A health official said data around comorbidities was not something they "could easily pull out" as information on underlying health conditions is also not "routinely collected".

An ACT Health spokesman has since confirmed that authorities hold some information around patient comorbidity.

The documents, revealed under freedom of information, showed there had been 393 patients admitted to Canberra public hospitals with COVID-19 since the start of the outbreak, as of January 27.

Health authorities did not know the vaccination status of 109 patients, which represented 27.7 per cent of all people admitted.

The vaccination status of some patients was even unknown after they had been admitted to intensive care and had been ventilated.

The vaccination status of nearly 20 per cent of people admitted to intensive care was unknown. Of the 31 people who had been ventilated, authorities were unclear on the vaccination status of four.

Of the 393 patients in total, 139, or 35.4 per cent, were unvaccinated, 116, or 29.5 per cent, were fully vaccinated and 29 patients, or 7.4 per cent, had received their first dose.

An ACT Health spokesman said there were many reasons why a person's COVID-19 vaccine status could be unknown, including patients being too ill to confirm their status and deviations between information given to territory health authorities and the Australian Immunisation Register.

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"There are several reasons why an individual COVID-19 vaccination might be unknown," the spokesman said.

"Critically ill patients may not be able to confirm their vaccination status; there may be differences in names or other identifying details that may limit information gathered from the Australian Immunisation Register."

Authorities stopped information being know around deaths in palliative care as the information was "anecdotal" as ACT Health did not record whether a person had been receiving palliative care.

Officials were also reluctant to reveal that only one person who died with COVID-19 in January had received a booster shot due to patient confidentiality.

But the documents revealed authorities were not collecting information around whether a person had specifically received a booster shot in late-January.

ACT Chief Health Officer Kerryn Coleman even wanted an explanation as to why information on booster shots was not available.

"Remind me though why we don't have booster status, noting almost complete data on hospitalisation," Dr Coleman wrote in an email.

A senior health official responded that people were not asked at that point whether they had received a booster shot, despite research showing that the third-shot offered much stronger protection against the infectious Omicron strain.

"Currently the line list received from the [Clinical Health Emergency Coordination Centre] includes dose one and dose two vaccines but not a line for boosters," a senior health official wrote in an email.

The Canberra Times had asked for information about the vaccination status of people who had died from COVID-19 in January 2022. There had been 11 deaths across the month.

Emails revealed that health officials were initially going to report only 10 deaths, as the death of one person had not been properly recorded in the system.

A man who died with COVID-19 had actually been marked as recovered in the system. The death of the man had been publicly reported at the time.

"I have doubled checked with the data team and we have tracked down the 11^th death - it was recorded as a recovered case in the system so wasn't picked up in reports," an email from a health official said.

Correspondence relating to a media inquiry that was submitted later in February also revealed that territory health authorities could not definitively confirm how many of the ACT's COVID-19 deaths had occurred in aged care.

By late-February there had been 17 deaths of people with COVID-19 in Canberra in 2022 but health authorities were unable to confirm how many were in aged care and did not want this information to be released.

"I would also suggest not stating nine of these were reported residents of aged care facilities since our records do not clearly or consistently identify [residents]," an email said.

"We were able to readily identify these nine, but we also agree that there may be more."

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