Healthcare firm considered misleading Australia’s immigration department about asylum seeker vaccinations to secure more lenient contractual obligations
International Health and Medical Services considered not telling the immigration department that new requirements for the vaccination of asylum seekers were less onerous than the previous ones. Photograph: Rafe Swan/Getty Images/Cultura RF
International Health and Medical Services (IHMS) considered misleading the immigration department about vaccination measurements for asylum seekers, leaked internal documents reveal.
Internal documents from IHMS, which runs medical care for asylum seekers in detention, reveal concerns about the standards of vaccinations at detention centres around Australia.
In a document dated November 2013 titled “new performance metrics table”, new measurements for IHMS’s clinical performance are outlined along with the department’s responses.
One of the changes outlined was for the first round of vaccinations to be completed within three weeks of arrival. At the time, the department required IHMS to vaccinate asylum seekers within seven days of their first GP examination.
But in a note attributed to “IHMS internal” the company says: “This new proposal is probably weaker than what the current drafting stipulates, ie categorise within 48 hours of the first GP examination and then vaccinate within 7 days after that.”
“DIAC [the immigration department] may not be aware of this so our strategy should be to accept this proposal and present it as though we are being cooperative and willing to accept an onerous metric.
“We should not accept this new metric in addition to existing vaccination metric as that would simply make it too complex. There should be a single vaccination metric based on this new proposal.”
The investigation has previously uncovered that the company believed fraud was likely to occur within its own ranks because of the nature of the performance metrics put forward by the immigration department.
Another internal presentation from October 2013 reveals that IHMS’s progress with vaccinating asylum seekers had seen “lower than expected productivity”.
This is attributed to several detention centres – including the northern immigration detention centre, Melbourne immigration detention centre, Curtin, Yongah Hill and Leonora – not having any immunisation nurses stationed at them.
The internal briefing notes that there are a “large percentage” of asylum seekers at mainland detention centres – about 854 – that had not begun to receive vaccinations at all in October 2013.
It said the majority of asylum seekers who had not started vaccination were from Villawood and Yongah Hill detention centres.
A spokeswoman for IHMS said: “IHMS is contractually required to vaccinate all detainees up to Australian immunisation handbook standards. Under the new contract negotiated between the department and IHMS there is a KPI [key performance indicator] in place which measures IHMS’s compliance with this new standard.”
A spokesman for the immigration minister, Peter Dutton, said the department was investigating a number of concerns raised about IHMS, adding the government “expects contract conditions to be met by any service provider”.