Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph Public Health is asking the Ministry of Health to introduce a “timely, user-friendly provincial immunization registry.”
The system WDGPH currently uses is only available for public health units to access, meaning staff are required to enter everyone’s records. If someone is vaccinated at a local pharmacy or in another municipality, for instance, it wouldn’t show up unless the specific public health unit is told and takes the time to add the information to the file; parents and physicians can’t enter that information directly, it has to be done by public health.
A provincial registry would mean when someone receives an immunization, it would be added immediately and public health could easily tell who is up to date and who isn’t.
“If someone goes to their physician and they want to get their vaccines updated and they don’t bring their records with them, the physician may not know that the child received their Hep B and HPB in Grade 7 because they don’t have access to (the system),” said Karen Mulvey, manager of vaccine preventable diseases at WDGPH during Wednesday’s Board of Health meeting.
“They’d have to call us. It just becomes very cumbersome.”
It would also help the emergency department determine whether someone needs a tetanus shot, for instance.
While the ministry is currently working on a registry like this, Dr. Nicola Mercer said the board is requesting it be an integrated model, meaning the registry would integrate electronic medical records supplied by hospitals and primary care physicians.
“I’m sure you’ve all heard about the really heavy workload of primary care physicians in particular,” Mercer said.
If the registry isn’t integrated, she said it could potentially pass some of the work WDGPH does to primary care physicians, who are already overworked.
“And that is certainly not something that we want to occur,” she said. “We want to make sure that the system put into place is fully integrated so you only enter it once.”
