Some Hospitals Drop Covid-19 Vaccine Mandates to Ease Labor Shortages
By Whelan & Evans, 12/13/21, Wall St. Journal

Some of the largest U.S. hospital systems have dropped
Covid-19 vaccine mandates for staff after a federal judge
temporarily halted a Biden admin mandate that healthcare
workers get the shots.

Hospital operators including HCA Healthcare Inc. & Tenet
Healthcare Corp. as well as nonprofits AdventHealth & the
Cleveland Clinic are dropping the mandates. Labor costs in
the industry have soared, & hospitals struggled to retain
enough nurses, technicians & even janitors to handle higher

hospitalizations in recent months as the Delta variant raged.
Vaccine mandates have been a factor constraining the supply
of healthcare workers, acc. to hospital execs, public-health

authorities & nursing groups.

Many hospitals already struggled to find workers, including
nurses, before the pandemic. The shortages were compounded
by burnout among many medical workers & the lure of high
pay rates offered to nurses who travel to hot spots on
short-term contracts.

More recently, 1000s of nurses have left the industry or
lost their jobs rather than get vaxxed. As of Sept, 30% of
workers at over 2,000 hospitals across the country surveyed
by the CDC were unvaxxed.

“It’s been a mass exodus, & a lot of people in the healthcare
industry are willing to go & shop around,” said Wade Symons,
an employee-benefits lawyer & head of consulting firm Mercer’s
U.S. regulatory practice. “If you get certain healthcare
facilities that don’t require it, those could be a magnet for
those people who don’t want the vaccine. They’ll probably have
an easier time attracting labor.”

A federal judge in Louisiana ruled in Nov that the Centers
for Medicare & Medicaid Services didn’t have the authority
to mandate vaccines for healthcare workers, blocking a Biden
admin rule that affected some 10 million workers. The mandate
had required all workers at facilities that participate in
Medicare & Medicaid to get 2nd shots by Jan. 4. The American
Hospital Assn estimates that 42% of U.S. hospitals, some
2,640 facilities, have Covid-19 vaccine mandates in place.

“I don’t think the mandates were helpful & I think the court
in Louisiana did everyone a service,” said Alan Levine, CEO
of Ballad Health, which runs 21 hospitals in Tenn. & Virginia.

Levine said his company has about 14,000 employees, some
2,000 of whom are unvaxxed or didn’t request an exemption to
the requirement. “That many people having to be terminated
would've been devastating to our system,” Levine said.

HCA, among the country’s largest healthcare providers by
number of hospitals, said in Nov that all employees needed
to get vaxxed by the Jan. 4 federal deadline. HCA said it
suspended its vaccine requirement after courts halted the
federal mandate.

“We continue to strongly encourage our colleagues to be
vaxxed as a critical step to protect individuals from the
virus,” HCA spokesman Harlow Sumerford said. He said a
majority of HCA’s roughly 275,000 employees are fully vaxxed.

AdventHealth & Tenet also said they wouldn’t require employees
to be vaxxed after the court decision. Workers in states that
mandate vaccination must comply with local laws, HCA & Tenet said.

The Cleveland Clinic, which has 19 hospitals in Ohio & Florida
& about 65,000 U.S. employees, & Utah hospital giant Intermtn

Healthcare also said they'd suspend vaxx requirements following
the courts’ actions. The Cleveland Clinic said it'd add safety

measures, such as periodic testing for unvaxxed employees who
care for patients. Intermountain said 98% of its workforce had
complied with the federal mandate.

Research into vaccine mandates has shown them to be largely
effective. Psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania
published research in the journal Nature in October showing
that vaccine mandates were more likely to prompt workers to
get a shot than to discourage them from doing so.

A study published Wednesday in the New England Journal of
Medicine found that Covid-19 cases and deaths were higher
among residents of nursing homes with the lowest rates of
staff vaccination. Researchers found that during the summer
of 2021, 4,775 Covid-19 cases and 703 nursing-home-resident
deaths from the illness could have been prevented if nursing-
home staff had higher vaxx rates.

Not all hospital systems have scratched the mandate. Kaiser
Permanente, which runs 39 hospitals & 100s of medical offices
in Calif & other states & employs nearly 210,000 people, said
it gave employees until Dec. 1 to get vaccinated. So far, 98%
of staff are vaxxed, but on Wednesday the hospital system
terminated 352 employees, & another 1,500 face termination
in early January unless they become fully vaxxed or receive
an exemption, Kaiser said.

Northwell Health, New York state’s largest healthcare provider
with 77,000 employees, said its mandate remains in place. In
Oct, Northwell told The Wall St. Journal that 1,400 employees
had been terminated for refusing to get vaccinated.

“We won't hire anyone who hasn't been vaccinated,” a
spokesman said.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/some-hospitals-drop-covid-19-vaccine-mandates-to-ease-labor-shortages-11639396806

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