After a few setbacks, the majority of the staff at Hadassah Hospital have received vaccines to protect them against the novel coronavirus. On Monday, the hospital released a statement and informed about the vaccination of most of its medical teams. This statement came against the backdrop of the hospital struggling to accommodate and treat the increasing number of patients in the country.
The hospital employs a total of 6,000 people out of which, 4,800 were given the first dose of vaccine. On the other hand, 1,000 staff members were given the second dose just recently.
In other news, around 50 employees of the Hadassah have volunteered to be a part of the Israeli vaccine trials. Prof. Zeev Rotstein, the head of the hospital congratulated all the employees who have volunteered to become test subjects.
He commended them on accepting this public and personal responsibility while saluting the efficiency of the vaccination teams of the Hadassah. He went on to highlight the hard work and dedication of all those employed at the medical center.
In the past week, Prof. Rotstein had been encouraging the employees of the hospital to get vaccinated. Soon after, a statement was issued that warned that only people who have been vaccinated, participating in the vaccine trials in the country, or recovered from the disease, will be allowed to work. Any employee who did not fall in any of these categories was going to be deemed non-essential and subject to lockdown rules.
As of now, Hadassah Ein Kerem is the one hospital that is treating the highest number of coronavirus patients in Jerusalem. There are a total of 133 patients admitted in its wards and this number is increasing rapidly. Therefore, the hospital’s situation is becoming challenging by day.
Earlier on Monday, the hospital was forced to send ambulances to its University Medical Center, located on Mount Scopus. The people traveling in these ambulances were non-coronavirus patients and were redirected to try and ease the overload on Hadassah Ein Kerem.
Rotstein personally addressed the overload being faced by the hospital just last week. He informed that there are not enough vaccines and expressed concern for the safety of the employees. He was worried that the staff may not be able to receive vaccines for the virus.
The main cause for concern for the head of the Hadassah stemmed from an announcement made by the Health Ministry. According to their latest decision, the process of vaccinating the citizens in hospitals would be halted and moved to the health funds in the country. This was decided after noticing that more people than expected were making appointments to receive the vaccine. In addition, the ministry refused to provide more doses of the vaccine to vaccinate hospital staff members.
However, other hospitals are not facing the same difficult situation. Instead, they took to blaming Hadassah for not adhering to protocol, which caused a lot of their staff members to be deprived of the vaccine.