Word: yorking
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...Winthrop hospital on New York's Long Island, the signs are everywhere. They're posted at every nurses' station, papered above the security panels against which employees swipe 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...
...mandate comes from the health department of New 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...
...some states. Vaccination can reduce the risk of getting influenza 70% to 80% and is the most effective way to curb the pandemic. "It is within the purview of health authorities that we engage in certain infection-control activities," says Susan Waltman, general counsel of the Greater New York Hospital Association, "and immunization of health-care workers is certainly among those activities...
...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 not to be immunized against influenza. "That's just not tolerable in health-care institutions, where patients come to be safe...
That is the type of alternative to mandatory vaccination that Angela, a nurse at Winthrop who prefers that her last name not be published, wants her hospital to offer. She has concerns about the mercury used in some flu shots and also feels that the New York State requirement is an infringement on her right to decide what treatments she receives. But neither of these reasons is sufficient to exempt her; only a medically documented condition like an egg allergy (flu vaccine is grown in chicken eggs) is an acceptable reason for not getting immunized...