New South Wales has overhauled its vaccination record-keeping process after it caused errors on the federal immunisation system, but experts say more needs to be done given people could be locked out of venues due to their vaccine status.
In recent months, Guardian Australia has reported on dozens of cases where fully vaccinated individuals had been left with either incomplete or inaccurate dose information on the Australian Immunisation Register (AIR), the commonwealth’s vaccination record system.
The AIR is used to generate Covid-19 vaccine certificates and will inform the Service NSW app, which is to be used for entry into premises for the fully vaccinated following Monday’s easing of restrictions. The commonwealth register will also underpin the Victoria check-in system.
The NSW problems were particularly pronounced at Sydney’s Olympic Park hub, where any discrepancy between the information recorded by vaccine teams to that held by the federal government caused a failure for the AIR to automatically update.
Errors were not corrected until an individual notified NSW Health and the vaccination provider manually corrected the information. That process was taking more than a month in some cases.
In a statement, the Sydney local health district said it had since taken steps to ensure patient information was verified and checked against the Medicare records at the point of booking.
“The district has worked hard at addressing this by improving the validation steps involved when a patient makes a booking to ensure data entered matches with Medicare records,” a spokesperson said. “New tools have also been introduced to search for patients with missing records.”
Until recently, the accuracy of the AIR has also been undermined by the system’s inability to recognise mixed doses, or AstraZeneca or Pfizer doses administered overseas.
Those issues have now been fixed by the federal government. A federal health department spokesperson said the AIR could now recognise mixed doses and overseas-administered Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson jabs given “on or after 1 October 2020”.
The department said it was a legal requirement that vaccinations were uploaded to the AIR within 10 days.
“The department works closely with Services Australia to investigate and resolve potential problems in the AIR,” a spokesperson said. “Enhancements to the Australian Immunisation Register are implemented as new clinical advice becomes available for Covid-19 vaccines.”
Dr Katie Attwell, an expert in vaccine mandates with the University of Western Australia, said she was not surprised the problems with AIR accuracy were occurring, given the system was old, inflexible, and relied on interactions between state and federal systems.
But she said if governments were to impose a mandate, they must ensure it was done seamlessly.
“If people are being locked out of venues or work or anything, really, on the basis of their vaccination status, it’s unacceptable that that occurs because the information is not correct,” she said.
Attwell said the system could benefit from major changes, particularly to allow it to collect data about a person’s reasons for not being vaccinated.
“One of the biggest challenges we face for childhood and adult vaccinations is we don’t have any way of measuring whether an individual is unvaccinated or under-vaccinated for acceptance reasons or for systemic and access reasons.
“In an ideal world, you might even develop a new system that allowed the capturing of relevant demographic and attitudinal information for individuals, such that we might know what they thought and what was happening.”
