The majority of hospitals now require their employees to get flu shots, but adoption of the practice lags far behind Veteran’s Administration hospitals, a new study found.
Last flu season was one of the most deadly in years for the US, killing a record-setting number of children and adults.
Flu viruses can be transmitted anywhere, but health care settings can be particular hot beds, as there is a high concentration of sick people and many patients with weakened immune systems.
In response, 70 percent of hospitals have rapidly introduced mandatory vaccination programs in recent years, but the VA’s shot requirements have stayed stagnant, leaving their patients vulnerable, a University of Michigan study reveals.
Less than five percent of Veterans Affairs hospitals require their employees to get flu shots, despite the fact that many of their patients are over 65 and particularly vulnerable to the virus
The 2017-2018 flu season left Americans reeling.
Unlike most iterations of the annual epidemic, this most recent sweep of the virus not only claimed the lives of the sick, elderly and infants, but killed many young adults as well.
Some blamed the poorly-matched flu vaccine – estimated to be only about 30 percent effective against the dominant and deadly H3N2 strain – for being a poor defense against the virus.
Throughout the season, though, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention maintained that getting the shot was still the best way to protect oneself from the flu and prevent its rapid spread across the US.
Vaccinated or not, more than 30,000 Americans were hospitalized with the flu between October 2017 and the end or April 2018.
The hospitals were left short-handed, short-supplied and stretched thin.
According to the new University of Michigan research, published in JAMA Network Open, 70 percent of those hospitals had requirements to that employees get vaccinated against the virus.
This is particularly important in health care settings which are teeming with bacteria, viruses, and people who are already sick or having surgery, for whom the contraction of one more bug could prove fatal.
In general, hospitals have gotten much better about vaccination requirements, which are 44 percent more common now than they just four years ago in 2013.
‘In just four years, the non-VA hospitals have really stepped up on requiring the vaccine, rather than just encouraging it,’ said Dr Todd Greene, the U-M and VA researcher who led the study.
This, he says is the best defense hospitals and their patients have against the virus’s spread.
‘Studies have shown that vaccination mandates, coupled with an option of declining vaccination in favor of wearing a mask, are most effective in reaching high percentages of vaccination,’ he added.
But the VA has been slow to adopt this best-practice, with vaccination rates in its hospitals creeping from one to four percent over the last four years, according to the study.
A VA directive issued last fall called for all employees to both get shots and wear masks, so it is an official priority for the agency, but that has not been borne out in practice.
Shot requirements have stirred controversy across the US and a slew of hospital workers claiming that they were wrongfully terminated for refusing mandated shots.
The new study and previous research suggest that there is particular reticence to vaccination in the veteran community and those who serve it.
With some 80 percent of annual flu deaths occurring among those over 65, American veterans are a particularly vulnerable population.
Yet according to previous research, about half of American veterans refuse flu vaccines when they are offered.
In health care settings too, those working with veterans have a ways to go to catch up to the rest of the population’s vaccination practices, let alone the CDC’s stated 90 percent vaccination goal.
In an accompanying editorial to the new study, Dr Hilary M. Babcock of Washington University said: ‘The use of mandates is increasing, and [health care personnel] HCP influenza vaccination rates are increasing. While the assumption that decreasing the risk of influenza in HCP will result in decreased risk of influenza in patients cared for by those HCP is common sense, for acute care settings, it is still largely an assumption.
‘Hopefully, the Veterans Health Administration will combine this initiative with thoughtful, planned, patient outcome assessments to help define the anticipated benefit of these efforts.’