Word: flu
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...their ID cards and even attached to paychecks. The notices are there to remind the hospital's staff - which includes everyone from the doctors and nurses who care for patients to the administrative, housekeeping and food-service personnel - that every employee must be vaccinated against both seasonal and H1N1 flu or face possible termination...
...York, which over the summer became the first state to require that all health-care workers be vaccinated against influenza. In other states, individual hospitals have taken the same aggressive position. Given that the pandemic H1N1 strain is circulating the globe - and that one of the seasonal-flu strains is resistant to Tamiflu, a commonly used antiviral treatment - such a policy seems logical. But is it legal? Flu-vaccine requirements are being challenged by health-care workers who maintain that decisions about vaccination should be theirs and theirs alone. In the state of Washington, the State Nurses Association, which...
...that few non-health-care companies would be willing to endure the inevitable protests against such a policy. "In health care, it strengthens an employer's argument that an employee might cause a direct threat by not being vaccinated," she says. (See pictures of thermal scanners hunting for swine flu...
Many states already require that people working in hospitals be immunized against measles, mumps and rubella, for example, and an influenza-vaccine mandate shouldn't be seen as any different from these standards. Yet when it comes to the flu shot, those in the medical field are notoriously incompliant: nationwide, only half of them voluntarily roll up their sleeves each year. "That just doesn't deliver the safe immunity level we need in a hospital," says Dr. Richard Daines, commissioner of health for New York State. It doesn't make sense, he says, for health-care workers...
...rigorous vaccination efforts, even voluntary ones, can brush up against thorny privacy issues. At Maryland's Johns Hopkins Hospital, personnel who choose to get a flu shot are provided with a colored clip to attach to their hospital ID. The idea is to make easily identifiable those who are unvaccinated and therefore need to wear masks when caring for patients with respiratory illnesses. The hospital intended to have two colored clips this year: one for seasonal flu and one for H1N1. But administrators realized that since the H1N1 vaccine is prioritized for specific groups, such as pregnant women and people...