After Canceling Appointments for the 21K Coronavirus Vaccine, Here’s How Ochsner Will Reschedule | Health care / hospitals

After canceling about 21,400 appointments for the first-dose coronavirus vaccine, Ochsner Health will begin rescheduling vaccinations on a weekly basis as it receives information on state shipments, officials said on Monday. of the hospital.

“It’s an evolution,” said Warner Thomas, CEO of Ochsner. “We thought we had a certain amount of vaccine. We have booked a number of appointments. At the end of the day, we don’t get it at that level. “

Going forward, Ochsner will begin rescheduling canceled first dose appointments between Fridays and Tuesdays, the time between when he is notified of the shipment he will receive from the state and when vaccines will be delivered, Thomas said.

The 21,400 residents on Ochsner’s waiting list will be carried over in the order of the original appointments. Any hospital staff who have not yet chosen to receive a vaccine will be added to the back of the line. Currently, 49.1% of hospital staff have been vaccinated.

As vaccines among hospital workers stabilized and eligibility expanded to those aged 70 and over, the state recruited nearly 1,800 small suppliers to ensure wide geographic reach. But that means some hospitals, like Ochsner’s Lafayette General, will not receive any doses this week after receiving 975 last week.

At the main campus of Ochsner, which distributes vaccines to several sites in southeast Louisiana, doses have dropped from 3,900 last week to 1,950 this week.

The state said allocation choices were based on equity and utilization, but the federal government’s supply was not sufficient to meet demand.

“The team is doing their best to distribute the vaccine evenly each week,” said Dr. Joe Kanter, acting deputy secretary of the Bureau of Public Health. “This means that there are no allotments” planned “week after week.”

The state’s supply is expected to remain stable but stable over the next four weeks, Kanter said.

LCMC Health, which operates six hospitals in the New Orleans area, has also started delaying appointments, citing a lack of supply at the federal level.

“Based on the vaccine allocations that we expect to receive in the coming weeks, we are adjusting our schedules to meet our allocation offer,” said LCMC President Dr John Heaton. The hospital system did not respond to questions about the number of adjusted appointments.

Ochsner and LCMC stressed that the second doses will continue as planned.

Emily Woodruff covers public health for The Times-Picayune | New Orleans lawyer as a member of the Report For America corps.