The mandates are being dropped by hospital operators such as HCA Healthcare Inc. and Tenet Healthcare Corp., as well as nonprofits AdventHealth and the Cleveland Clinic. As the Delta variant raged, labor costs in the industry skyrocketed, and hospitals struggled to retain enough nurses, technicians, and even janitors to handle increased hospitalizations. Vaccine mandates, according to hospital executives, public-health authorities, and nursing groups, have been a factor limiting the supply of healthcare workers.
Many hospitals were already having difficulty finding workers, including nurses, prior to the pandemic. Burnout among many medical workers, as well as the allure of high pay rates offered to nurses who travel to hot spots on short-term contracts, exacerbated the shortages.
Thousands of nurses have recently left the industry or lost their jobs rather than get vaccinated. As of September, 30 percent of workers at more than 2,000 hospitals across the country were unvaccinated, according to a survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"There has been a mass exodus, and a lot of people in the healthcare industry are willing to go and shop around," said Wade Symons, an employee-benefits lawyer and the head of Mercer's U.S. regulatory practice. "If you get specific healthcare facilities that don't require it, those could be a magnet for those who don't want the vaccine." They'll most likely have an easier time attracting workers."
In November, a federal judge in Louisiana ruled that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services lacked the authority to require vaccines for healthcare workers, effectively blocking a Biden administration rule that affected 10 million workers. The mandate required all workers at Medicare and Medicaid facilities to get second shots by January 4. According to the American Hospital Association, 42 percent of U.S. hospitals, or approximately 2,640 facilities, have Covid-19 vaccine mandates in place.
"I don't think the mandates were helpful, and I think the Louisiana court did everyone a favor," said Alan Levine, CEO of Ballad Health, which operates 21 hospitals in Tennessee and Virginia.
Mr. Levine stated that his company has approximately 14,000 employees, 2,000 of whom are unvaccinated or have not requested an exemption from the requirement. "Having to fire that many people would have been devastating to our system," Mr. Levine said.
HCA, one of the country's largest healthcare providers in terms of hospital count, stated in November that all employees needed to be vaccinated by the federal deadline of January 4th. HCA stated that it suspended its vaccine requirement after the federal mandate was halted by the courts.
"We continue to strongly encourage our colleagues to get vaccinated as a critical step in protecting individuals from the virus," said HCA spokesman Harlow Sumerford. He claims that the vast majority of HCA's approximately 275,000 employees are fully vaccinated.
Following the court decision, AdventHealth and Tenet also stated that they would not require employees to be vaccinated. Workers in states that require vaccination must follow local laws, according to HCA and Tenet.
Following the court's decision, the Cleveland Clinic, which operates 19 hospitals in Ohio and Florida and employs approximately 65,000 people in the United States, and Utah hospital giant Intermountain Healthcare both announced that vaccine requirements would be suspended. The Cleveland Clinic said it would increase safety measures, such as testing unvaccinated employees who care for patients on a regular basis. Intermountain reported that 98 percent of its employees had complied with the federal mandate.
Vaccine mandates have been shown to be largely effective in studies. In October, psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania published research in the journal Nature demonstrating that vaccine mandates were more likely to encourage workers to get vaccinated rather than discourage them from doing so.
According to a study published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, Covid-19 cases and deaths were more common among residents of nursing homes with the lowest rates of staff vaccination. Researchers discovered that if nursing-home staff had higher vaccination rates during the summer of 2021, 4,775 Covid-19 cases and 703 nursing-home-resident deaths from the illness could have been avoided.
The mandate has not been met by all hospital systems. Kaiser Permanente, which employs nearly 210,000 people and operates 39 hospitals and hundreds of medical offices in California and other states, said it gave employees until December 1 to get vaccinated. So far, 98 percent of employees have been vaccinated, but the hospital system terminated 352 employees on Wednesday, and another 1,500 face termination in early January unless they are fully vaccinated or receive an exemption, according to Kaiser.
Northwell Health, New York's largest healthcare provider with 77,000 employees, stated that its mandate is still in effect. Northwell told The Wall Street Journal in October that 1,400 employees had been fired for refusing to be vaccinated.
"We will not hire anyone who has not been vaccinated," said a company spokesman.