Ochsner to Delay Thousands of Appointments for Coronavirus Vaccine After Receiving No New Doses in Regular Shipment | Coronavirus

Ochsner Health System, the largest in Louisiana, said it would delay vaccine appointments for thousands of patients after receiving zero new doses in its regular shipment this week, complicating the system’s mass vaccination plan. health which has more than 100,000 appointments on the books.

After receiving tens of thousands of doses in the first four weeks of the state’s vaccination effort, Ochsner did not receive any new doses for patients earlier this week, when shipments typically arrive, confirmed The Louisiana Department of Health and senior Ochsner officials Friday. . The second doses are still pouring in, which means patients will still be able to receive the required second vaccine, officials said.

Ochsner will continue to use the doses he has to immunize people by Wednesday. From Thursday to the following Monday, Ochsner CEO Warner Thomas said patients who needed to be vaccinated would be notified that their appointments were being rescheduled. Hospital officials declined to say how many appointments are affected, but said the number ran into the thousands.

After Ochsner informed the Louisiana Department of Health about the high volume of appointments it had booked, the agency said it decided to reroute around 2,000 doses initially allocated to other providers but not used in the state distribution warehouse in Shreveport. Department of Health spokesperson Aly Neel said that after Ochsner informed the department of the volume of appointments he had, the agency dispatched 780 doses on Thursday and made the decision Friday send 1,280 more to the health system. It is not known if any arrived on Friday.

Yet that is only a fraction of the 9,450 doses Ochsner received the week before. To date, Ochsner has administered 67,000 doses, said Chief Medical Officer Robert Hart, and had about 113,000 appointments for immunizations. A spokesperson for Ochsner said the new doses diverted by the state did not change the health system’s plan to delay appointments.

Thomas said Ochsner hopes to receive an influx of doses in the coming weeks, but appointments beyond those dates may also have to be delayed. He said the system was working to find unused doses from other providers that could be used to inoculate Ochsner’s patients.

The Department of Health makes decisions about where to deliver federal shipments every Thursday, Neel said. Last week, as the agency made the decision, officials saw that Ochsner had “significant remaining inventory.”

“Although we have very few vaccines available to us … it’s really important that we can get the vaccine where it’s needed most,” she said.

“We certainly cannot redirect or distribute vaccines already assigned to another supplier,” added Neel. “But if there is a vaccine that becomes available, we want to do what we can to help.” She said the roughly 2,000 doses rerouted to Ochsner were originally intended for providers who could no longer use them.

Thomas of Ochsner said the state “felt there was going to be a much larger vaccine allocation from the federal government” than it actually received. This week, Louisiana received 55,775 doses, of which nearly 19,000 were diverted to a federal program to immunize residents and staff of nursing homes. The Louisiana Department of Health said Friday it expects around 58,000 doses next week, and none of them are diverted to the federal partnership.

“Everyone was following certain directions and assumptions of what we thought the federal government was going to come,” Thomas said in an interview. “The state was making these assumptions, we were making these assumptions, and that’s not what happened. So we had to adapt.

Once the state opened up vaccinations to people 70 and older and an expanded roster of healthcare workers, Ochsner established an ambitious vaccination schedule, putting around 113,000 appointments on the books, officials said. . Meanwhile, demand has skyrocketed, with elderly patients flooding drugstore phone lines, many of whom have started waiting lists.

Louisiana’s immunization program is administered by hundreds of providers, many of which are pharmacies that have so far received around 200 doses. The health ministry said all 210 pharmacies and other providers receiving doses for elderly patients and health workers will be restocked next week, if they are still not working on their current inventory.

The Franciscan Missionaries of Notre-Dame health system, which includes the Notre-Dame-du-Lac Regional Medical Center in Baton Rouge, has taken a different approach than Ochsner’s. Instead of opening up the online scheduling system to its 60,000 patients who meet the criteria, Dr Jimmy Craven, chairman of the system’s medical office, said staff members are manually calling patients to schedule appointments by due to the state’s limited supply.

“Our concern is an inability to access the vaccine,” he said in an interview Thursday. “How do you plan someone for something without knowing if you have it to deliver what you planned?”

The Baton Rouge general said on Friday he was doubling his capacity to administer vaccines to around 1,500 per week. The hospital has opened its planning system to the public by phone or website. Spokeswoman Katie Johnston said the hospital is filling additional appointment slots with people on an availability list who meet current criteria.

Hart said Ochsner will vaccinate thousands more patients by Wednesday. The hospital would not immediately set a new appointment date for these patients.

“We’re not giving them a new date right now,” Hart said. “Not knowing what our vaccine supply will be, what we don’t want to do is cancel it and reschedule it over and over again for the same patient.”

Thomas added that Ochsner is evaluating whether to change the way he handles appointments given the lack of doses this week.

“The zero dose sent to us this week was definitely a surprise,” Thomas said. “We did not anticipate this.”

Editors Andrea Gallo, Ben Myers and Emily Woodruff contributed to this report.