Hospital Staffing Shortages a Concern with Mandatory Vaccinations

The American Hospital Association (AHA) recently supported hospitals and health systems requiring COVID-19 vaccination for their employees, but some leaders are concerned that a mandate could exacerbate hospital staffing shortages.

NewYork-Presbyterian, Yale New Haven, and Trinity Health are just some of the hospitals and health systems mandating employees to require a COVID-19 vaccine in order to continue working in the current environment. Other organizations like Banner Health have also said they would implement similar policies.

COVID-19 vaccinations are safe and effective at reducing the risk of becoming infected and spreading the virus to other individuals, the AHA said in its new policy statement. Hospitals and health systems should be able to implement mandatory COVID-19 vaccination policies, with local factors and situations influencing whether and how these policies are implemented, the leading hospital group stated.

“Doing so will help protect the health and well-being of health care personnel and the patients and communities they proudly serve,” Rick Pollack, AHA’s president and CEO, said publicly last week.

However, hospital and health system leaders are worried that requiring healthcare personnel to get vaccinated for COVID-19 will make staffing shortages even worse.

“I agree fundamentally with what the hospital association is saying and with what other hospital systems are now doing with the mandates, but those systems are in different environments and markets,” Alan Levine, CEO of Ballad Health, said in a recent call with local news station News Channel 11.

“If today I said, ‘everybody’s required to take the vaccine or you’re terminated,’ then I have a problem being able to take care of people who show up to our ER with strokes, or chest pains, or medical admissions or surgical admissions,” Levine continued.

For now, Ballad Health will not implement a mandatory COVID-19 vaccination policy across its 22 hospitals. Although, the idea isn’t off the table, especially considering rising COVID-19 numbers because of the Delta variant, according to the report.

Mosaic Life Care, a small hospital group in Missouri, has similar concerns with a mandatory COVID-19 vaccination policy, The New York Times reports. “We have the potential to lose some caregivers to other systems,” Joey Austin, a spokeswoman for Mosaic, told the national news source.

About 62 percent of Mosiac’s staff were vaccinated at the time of the article’s publication on July 21st.

These hospital staffing shortage concerns may be valid. Over 150 employees at Houston Methodist recently resigned or were fired after the Texas-based health system become one of the first healthcare organizations to mandate COVID-19 vaccinations.

An overwhelming majority of practicing physicians—96 percent—are fully vaccinated for COVID-19, according to an American Medical Association (AMA) survey released last month. And of the small percentage who are not vaccinated, 45 percent plan to do so.

But hospitals and health systems comprise a wide range of employees, not just physicians.

Recent data from WedMD and Medscape Medical News show that just one in four hospital workers who have direct contact with patients have not received a single dose of a COVID-19 vaccine by the end of May. The proportion of unvaccinated hospital workers was also larger at one in three workers among the nation’s 50 largest hospitals, revealed the data, which included 2,500 hospitals in the US.

Requiring COVID-19 vaccinations among healthcare personnel is creating some worries right now, but it could be a “logical addition to institutional safety programs,” an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University Medical Center contends.

“As the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines move closer to full licensure and the data on their excellent effectiveness against both symptomatic and asymptomatic COVID-19 infection emerge, the question of whether to implement a SARS-CoV-2 vaccination policy for HCP as a condition of employment is becoming clearer,” Thomas R. Talbot, MD, MPH wrote in a JAMA Viewpoint article.

“HCP should not inadvertently spread contagious infections like measles and influenza to their patients and other HCP. The time is coming to add COVID-19 to that list.”