Experts say nearly 60 percent of health care workers fail to get a flu shot despite recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that all health care workers get vaccinated, from hospital volunteers to doctors.
“It is a professional obligation on the part of health care workers to make sure that they are as protected against influenza as possible,” said Dr. William Schaffner, chairman of the Department of Preventive Medicine at Vanderbilt University.
But operating room nurse Pauline Taylor said ever since she got sick after getting a shot a few years ago, she’s sworn off the vaccine.
“I rarely get sick. The only thing I could narrow it down to is that I had gotten this shot,” said Taylor, who works at University Hospitals and Clinics in Iowa City. “I know that it’s not a live virus. It just seemed pretty coincidental.”
Stories like that are particularly frustrating for Dr. Schaffner.
He argues that getting vaccinated for the flu should be standard for doctors and nurses, just like washing their hands. That’s because the flu virus can be spread so easily.
Schaffner, who is also president-elect of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, said being in close proximity to patients, having conversations with them, bending over their bed, seeing them in the clinic while you’re doing procedures, you would be breathing out viruses and spreading influenza into your patients.
Schaffner’s nonprofit group educates the public and health care industry about the causes, treatment and prevention of infectious diseases. It gets about 75 percent of its budget from major vaccine makers, but executive director Len Novick said the money comes with no strings attached.
But experts say there are few well-documented cases of flu outbreaks caused by health care workers because it’s tough to prove sick health care workers are to blame for hospital outbreak.
The foundation said likely cases of flu outbreaks between health care workers and patients include:
– 19 babies in a neonatal intensive care unit in Ontario, Canada, infected in 2000; one died. Health care workers, only 15 percent of whom were immunized, were the likely source.
– 65 residents of a nursing home in New York got the flu during the 1991-1992 flu season, and two died. Only 10 percent of health care workers had been vaccinated before the outbreak, according to a report by the CDC.
Health care workers opt not to get vaccinated for the same reasons others are hesitant, Schaffner said. Some also don’t realize how easily they can spread the disease, sometimes before they know they’re infected or even if they have only a mild case.
He said it is a “myth” that you can get flu from the vaccine.
The CDC recommends that health care facilities offer free flu vaccines to employees annually at work, and that hospitals obtain signed statements from workers who refuse.
The CDC also suggests a flu shot is most important for people age 50 and over, the chronically ill, and women who will be pregnant during the flu season. This year virtually all children from 6 months to 18 years were added to the list.
Several states have laws requiring hospitals to make the vaccines available.
Some hospitals are seeing to it that vaccinations are a requirement.
At Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle, even sales reps, vendors and volunteers must be vaccinated unless they seek exceptions for religious or medical reasons. Even then, those who don’t get a shot must wear a mask whenever they are in the hospital during the flu season.
About 99 percent of the hospital’s more than 5,000 employees were vaccinated.
They lost around seven employees when the policy took effect four years ago, according to Dr. Joyce Lammert, the hospital’s chief of medicine.
“A lot of reasons we heard about people not wanting flu shots was all about them – it’s my freedom, I don’t want to get it, I get sick when I get it,” Lammert said. “Now, the culture has really changed to thinking about patients. This is what we do to protect our patients.”
Patients should ask their doctors if they’ve gotten their flu shot, Lammert said.
“I wouldn’t go to anybody who didn’t,” she said.
—
On the Net:
Comments