Nurses Who Won’t Vax Threaten Staffing Shortages
Front-line workers were already in tight supply. With almost 1 in 8 nursing professionals not planning to get a shot, the problem’s going to get worse.
A person holds a sign in front of Houston Methodist in Baytown, Texas, to protest a policy that says hospital employees must get the Covid vaccine or lose their jobs.
Photographer: Yi-Chin Lee/Houston Chronicle/AP
Mandate the vaccine, and some of your nurses will quit. Don’t mandate the vaccine, and some of your nurses will get Covid—rendering them unable to work, or even landing them in the very intensive care unit where they normally work. For a hospital administrator who’s been dealing with nursing shortages escalating throughout the pandemic, this is the dilemma.
“It’s a cynical question, but what gets us to losing the higher amount of staff?” says Alan Levine, chief executive officer of Ballad Health, which has 21 hospitals and other centers serving patients in Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. He decided not to require vaccinations for his health-care workers after modeling suggested he could see 15% of nurses, or as many as 900, leave if he did. That’s more than he anticipates losing to Covid-19 quarantines and illness, even with the most recent surge filling up the network’s ICUs and 130 staffers quarantining on a single mid-August day. At Ballad, 97% of doctors are vaccinated. Among front-line nurses, he estimates vaccination rates hover around 50%.