Steamships commences its vaccination schedule at Rita Flynn.
26 May 2021
Several hundred Steamships employees from around the country have now received their first vaccinations. This includes more than 100 frontline employees from Steamships subsidiaries including Pacific Palms Property, Pacific Towing and Coral Sea Hotels who received their first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine in Port Moresby last week. The group also included staff from joint venture partner Colgate Palmolive.
“This is a great step forward for Steamships in our aim to ensuring that all our staff across the country get the opportunity to get vaccinated”, remarked Rupert Bray, Managing Director of Steamships. “We continue to provide awareness and education to our employees and are anticipating that a good percentage of our workforce will have had their first jab by the end of July. When it is appropriate, we are also planning to get families of our staff vaccinated, after all, no one is safe until we’re all safe”.
The company has worked hard to operate within the Niupla Pasin protocols. A ‘Covid Toksave’ newsletter containing testimonials, updated information on the vaccination process, and educational articles and video links, is issued twice a week. The company has a Covid workplace policy which clearly articulates Covid safety protocol, and it also conducts regular testing of key frontline employees.
Corporate Affairs General Manager, David Toua, said that maintaining a safe and healthy work environment continues to be a priority. “Covid safe protocols such as temperature checks, face masks and social distancing are now pretty much second nature and we have introduced a robust testing regime”, said Toua. “The gamechanger is the vaccine”, continued Toua. “Only when we get a good percentage of the population vaccinated, can we start to think about a return to normalcy”.