By Craig Hughes; Michael O’Farrell
AN online HSE system used for staff vaccination has been widely abused by non-Âhealthcare employees – with many exploiting loopholes to skip the queue for a jab.
The Irish Daily Mail can reveal that the HSE’s online portal for arranging frontline inoculations is not robust at checking vaccine candidates’ identification.
A HSE whistleblower has told the Mail how she did not need identification to get the jab.
She also claimed she knows of at least three people who managed to jump the queue by falsely posing as healthcare workers on the HSE’s vaccination portal. The HSE has since closed the online portal, which could be accessed by anyone who had the link and did not require a password.
A new national portal for people to register for a Covid-19 vaccine is set to be up and running by the third week in April.
Meanwhile, figures released to Sinn Féin health spokesman David Cullinane show that the HSE does not know the exact occupation of one in four people who have received their first dose as ‘frontline healthcare workers’.
The vaccination rollout has been hit with a number of queue-jumping controversies to date.
This newspaper has revealed a number of instances of the Beacon Hospital vaccinating people out of sequence, including 20 teachers at the elite private school attended by CEO Michael Cullen’s children.
The latest revelations come just hours after the Government overhauled the prioritisation system for vaccinations.
Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly told a press briefing yesterday that the new model, which only uses age and not other risk factors such as occupation, will be ‘more efficient, more transparent and more effective’.
The new system will be used after those aged over 70, the vulnerable and those with underlying medical conditions are fully inoculated.
At the weekend, The Irish Mail on Sunday revealed it had successfully used false details to get a vaccination appointment, without any verification process, by using the HSE’s flawed online portal.
The IMoS registered as a ‘2a’ category frontline healthcare worker in an environment ‘with potential for active transmission’.
After receiving a text confirmation to get the jab, the IMoS reporter was not told to bring any work ID with them to be vaccinated.
The booking system asked individuals to input the primary healthcare facility where they worked. However, if they were ‘unable to find’ the location where they worked, they could simply enter the CHO (community healthcare organisation) area instead.
A HSE spokeswoman last night said that the portal was ‘designed to be easy and straightforward’ to allow for registration to take place ‘quickly and effectively’.
She added: ‘All healthcare staff who are due to be vaccinated will have their details validated at the time of vaccination. If at this point a healthcare staff member has registered out of sequence they will have to go into the portal and update their records.’
However, a HSE whistleblower, legitimately vaccinated after going through the online booking portal, confirmed she did not need her work ID to get the jab at the Aviva Stadium. The whistleblower told the Mail it was ‘just simply wrong’ that people were able to so easily jump the queue with no safeguards in place.
‘I know of three people directly who used it to be vaccinated. One works in education, the other is a student (non-medical) and the third has a medical background but works in an office,’ she said.
The latest HSE figures show that almost 220,000 frontline healthcare workers had receive the first dose of the vaccine by March 22. However, there are just 80,000 frontline healthcare workers employed by the HSE. Other private-sector healthcare workers, such as those in private hospitals, private nursing homes and section 38/39 organisations, as well as therapists, GPs and their staff, all count as frontline healthcare workers. The HSE has been unable to clarify how many people they think are eligible for vaccination in this cohort.
HSE chief clinical officer Dr Colm Henry yesterday admitted to this newspaper that the number vaccinated in this cohort ‘appears high’. Dr Henry said clear instructions were provided to healthcare managers when the portal went live ‘in good faith’.
However, Dr Henry said the impact of getting large numbers of frontline healthcare workers vaccinated has had a major positive impact on reducing serious illness and deaths.
He said the impact on healthcare staff was clearly evident in the rapidly decreasing levels of illness among them.
Figures released to Mr Cullinane by the HSE show the occupation was not recorded for 33,082 people (of a total of 166,064) who had received their first dose by March 5. A further 12,934 are listed as ‘other’; ‘nursing’ accounted for 30,933; while 29,151 were described as ‘health and social care professional’. In ‘management and administration’, 17,333 got the jab; ‘medical and dental’ accounted for 16,323 recipients; ‘other patient client care staff’ totalled 13,011; ‘general support staff totalled 9,632; and ‘general’ totalled 3,294.
There were also 371 ‘retired’ workers included in the figures.
The HSE spokeswoman said that a ‘HSE data quality team are working to correctly code these people on an ongoing basis’ and that when these ‘non-coded people return for their second dose, staff are reminded on the system to correctly categorise them’. However, the figures show that 18,308 people who received their second doses had no occupation record and 7,656 listed as ‘other’ also received their second dose.
Mr Cullinane said he believes the frailty of the IT system being used is the reason for the change in vaccine prioritisation.
‘We said from the very start that we had concerns about the IT system and whether the portal was robust and secure,’ he said.
‘I think the reason why they have pulled out the allocation groups is because they simply don’t trust the system and don’t have the ability to drill down into the categories to find out who’s who.’ He added that if it is the case that the system can be ‘manipulated and abused’ it will again outrage people at the top of the vaccination rollout list who should not have been bypassed.
One of the companies given the HSE link was Health Tech Ireland – a trade association for manufacturers, developers and distributors of health technology products.
Its CEO Justin Carty circulated the link to around 150 senior managers in member companies with the specific instruction that it should only be used by people who meet the criteria of genuine frontline healthcare worker.
He added that he wasn’t aware of people abusing the portal and said some of his members would have been engaging on the frontline providing essential services.
