Vaccination update

Key numbers as at 17 January 2022

Our approach

Corrections knows that getting vaccinated against COVID-19 is the best thing that we can all do to keep ourselves, the people we manage, our team and our wider community safe from COVID-19. We are committed to ensuring that all of our staff and people in prison have access to the COVID-19 vaccination on an ongoing basis.

Since the launch of our vaccination programme in May we have taken a proactive approach to strongly encourage everyone to be vaccinated against COVID-19. We have a dedicated national team overseeing our vaccination programme, and custodial and health COVID-19 vaccination leads at each prison. Comprehensive communications have been enacted throughout, which includes but is not limited to provision of information about vaccine safety and effectiveness via a dedicated page on our internal website (for staff), information and engaging material on prisoner kiosks, Prisoner TV, forums and conversations with health staff, posters, pamphlets and other materials, including in a range of languages.

We continue to explore different means of reaching people in prison to strongly encourage them to be vaccinated. This includes local and national initiatives and shared insights across our prisons to boost uptake of the vaccine. Initiatives include promoting word of mouth discussions with influential leaders in our prisons, culturally targeted educational forums, and a drive-through vaccination clinic at Rimutaka Prison that took place recently.

We have followed Ministry of Health guidance throughout the roll-out of our vaccination programme to people in prison.

Our own Corrections Health Services teams at prisons have been administering COVID-19 vaccines to people in prison as part of their role as frontline health workers. Prisons have developed robust site vaccination plans which involve appropriate levels of oversight from custodial staff during the vaccination process. Private providers were used to vaccinate staff on site at prisons.

On June 11 Corrections was advised that a decision had been made by the Ministry of Health to slow the roll-out of the COVID-19 vaccine to certain groups, including people in prison. This decision was made in order to manage stocks of the vaccine in the lead up to new vaccine deliveries. As a result, Corrections paused the roll-out of the COVID-19 vaccine to prisoners at all sites from Monday 14 June. Our prisoner vaccination programme resumed in late July. Where prisoners have declined vaccinations previously, we continue to actively engage them and provide further information and opportunities to be vaccinated as a priority. All prison sites are also offering the vaccine to all prisoners newly received into prison, and if they decline at that point, we continue to provide additional opportunities for them to take up the opportunity to be vaccinated.

Detailed breakdown of vaccines delivered by site

The table below shows the total number of COVID-19 vaccines administered to people currently at each prison, broken down by dose and prison site.

Please note that for people in prison, the site column reflects the prison where people are currently located, not necessarily the prison where they received their vaccine. The population of each prison changes daily due to arrests, releases, court decisions and transfers, and therefore we are not able to provide these numbers as a percentage of each site’s population.