Hospitals say vaccine mandates are working despite fears of prompting labor shortages.

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Mon, 2021-10-18 10:23 — mike kraft

Vaccine mandates stoked fears of labor shortages. But hospitals say they’re working. The controversy surrounding fired hospital employees, lawsuits and protests obscured a simple fact: The vaccine mandates worked, administrators say. Washington Post

At Houston Methodist — one of the first American health-care institutions to require workers to get vaccinated against the coronavirus — the backlash was short-lived.

More than 150 employees were fired. There were legal battles and protests. But President and CEO Marc Boom has no regrets: 98 percent of staff have been vaccinated, and they and patients are safer as a result, he said.

“I can unequivocally say [it was] the best decision we ever made,” Boom said in an interview.

Houston Methodist is not alone in requiring its employees to be vaccinated. About 41 percent of hospitals nationwide — roughly 2,570 facilities — have some sort of vaccine mandate, according to data collected by the American Hospital Association, a trade group. Others are expected to follow after President Biden announced last month that he would require most health-care facilities that accept Medicaid or Medicare funding — many of which also treat immunocompromised people who are at high risk of getting severely ill from covid — to vaccinate their employees.

Most health-care systems that require vaccination have touted widespread compliance. In interviews, administrators at some of the nation’s largest hospital systems said the mandates worked: Officials said that they have very high vaccination rates they attributed to the requirement and that they have seen coronavirus infections — and sick leaves — noticeably drop.

At Novant Health, a 35,000-employee health-care system in four Southeast states, more than 99 percent of workers have complied with a vaccine mandate, spokeswoman Caryn Klebba wrote in an email.

“Without a vaccine mandate for team members, we faced the strong possibility of having a third of our staff unable to work due to contracting, or exposure to, COVID-19,” she said. “This possibility only increases heading into a fall season with the more contagious and deadly Delta variant.” ...

In New York, a statewide vaccine mandate for health-care workers, which went into effect on Sept. 27, increased the number of people getting immunized. Ninety percent of the state’s health-care workforce is now vaccinated, according to state data. Northwell Health, the state’s largest provider, said it fired 1,400 employees — less than 2 percent of its 76,000-member workforce — for refusing to get vaccinated. Northwell said it expects no interruptions to its service as a result of the terminations.

A federal judge ruled Tuesday that the state must continue to allow health-care workers to request religious exemptions as a lawsuit over the state’s vaccine requirement proceeds.

But many hospitals still lack mandates, and efforts to vaccinate every eligible staff member have lagged. Some officials fear that staff members, overwhelmed from the summer delta variant surge, could remain exposed amid a potential “twindemic” of covid and flu spikes this winter. ...

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