Several hospitals have begun to consider eliminating or limiting vaccine requirements for staff due to growing labor shortages throughout the industry. Federal judge Terry A. Doughty postponed the Biden administration’s mandate that all healthcare workers get vaccinated.
Hospitals have taken this opportunity to eliminate the vaccine requirement for their employees, these hospitals include HCA Healthcare Inc., Tenet Healthcare Corp., AdventHealth, and Cleveland Clinic. Hospitals have been struggling with rising labor costs as well as significant labor losses to the point where hospitals have struggled to even maintain janitors. Nurses have quit their jobs at high rates with thousands of nurses quitting over opposition to the vaccine. Wade Symons, an employee-benefits lawyer and head of consulting firm Mercer’s U.S. regulatory practice stated “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.”
Originally HCA, which is one of the largest healthcare providers in the world, required that all of the company's 275,000 employees be fully vaccinated by January 4th, 2022. Currently, more than half of the company’s employees are fully vaccinated; however, requirements of fully vaccinated employees could trigger a mass exodus of labor and as a result, the company has now shifted their position on the subject to only recommend that their employees become fully vaccinated.
A lack of vaccination requirements may have an impact on the health of patients visiting these hospitals as the New England Journal of Medicine released a study showing that Covid-19 death rates were higher within nursing homes in which the staff was not fully vaccinated.
Source: Wall Street Journal
