H1N1 cost unknown

The Thunder Bay District Health Unit’s director of health protection says it I still too difficult to determine the exact cost of the H1N1 vaccination clinics administered last fall.

Although the health unit received more than $300,000 from the province on a per dose basis to administer the vaccine, Ken Allan said capturing the total cost of the program is problematic.

"If you were to analyze the costs of shipping the vaccine up here, the provincial advertising and communication campaign, you’d have to look at costs that would be outside of the health unit," he said.

The health unit is still tracking its costs and Allan said they’re accruing expenses towards the end of the fiscal year, adding the $300,000 from the province did go a long way because they delivered the H1N1 program by reallocating their own resources.

"Because we used staff from other program areas, the health unit itself didn’t incur any additional costs but there would have been an impact on the programs," Allan said. "That is something that is a little difficult to measure."

Over the course of their H1N1 clinics, the health unit itself immunized more than 30,000 people. An additional 15,000 people were immunized through community partners and physicians’ offices.

When the immunization program first started last October, local clinics were seeing up to 1,400 people per day, which Allen said was a bit surprising.

"Our initial information at the beginning of the campaign was that demand was going to be somewhat softer than it turned out to be," he said. "Our information was we weren’t going to be seeing the demand we experienced … we would probably have started large and scaled back as opposed to starting out small and ramping out."

Even with contingency plans in place, it did take the health unit a few days to meet the community demand.

Allen said next year’s influenza immunizations will include an H1N1 component in them instead of having it as a separate vaccine and the health unit is looking at the possibility of evening and weekend flu clinics to better serve the public.