Some interesting data from the 3 largest
local hospitals about their employee vaccination rates and policies:
Michelle Kligman, chief experience officer and senior vice president of human resources for
Jackson Health, said about 85% of employees are fully vaccinated, and that the recent wave has encouraged more to do so in the hope of evading the virus. “That helps,” Kligman said. “What they’re experiencing is a mild illness for about five to six days.“ Jackson Health does not require vaccination as a condition of employment, but those who are not vaccinated are banned from dining areas, must wear N-95 respirator masks at all times while indoors, and pay a bi-weekly penalty of $50 in health insurance premiums.
At
Memorial Healthcare in South Broward, Vargas-Hernandez said about 90% of staff is vaccinated. Memorial Healthcare System does not have a vaccine mandate, but those workers who do not take the shots must wear N-95 respirator masks indoors and attend meetings via video conference or phone.
In November,
Baptist Health reported that 94% of its more than 24,000 employees were vaccinated, and about 5% had received an approved exemption for religious or medical reasons.
About 120 employees, or less than 1% of Baptist Health’s workforce, did not comply with the mandate and resigned.
Although vaccine policies have helped hospitals weather the current surge, few have enforced a hard mandate for employees — citing the conflict between the federal government’s mandate for healthcare workers to be vaccinated by Jan. 4 and Florida’s legal ban on employer vaccine mandates adopted in November. Though federal courts have ordered preliminary injunctions blocking the vaccine mandate, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services or CMS said in a Dec. 28 memo that the agency will enforce the mandate in 25 states, including Florida. Under the CMS vaccine mandate, those hospitals that do not achieve 100% vaccination rates for workers risk being terminated from the Medicare and Medicaid programs, the largest payers in the U.S. healthcare system. CMS administrators said in the Dec. 28 memo that hospitals will have until the end of March to comply with the rule or risk losing access to federal healthcare programs. But Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration has refused to comply.