SNF Employees Vaccination Rates Important to Residents

We have read stories about the efforts in various states to encourage folks to get vaccinated.  Bloomberg Law ran a story last week that looks at the impact on SNF residents when staffers are not vaccinated. ‘Flat-Out Resistant’ Staffers Imperil Nursing Home Vaccine Goal  gives this data:

An industry effort to vaccinate 75% of nursing home staff against Covid-19 by July 1 appears to be faltering as continued employee hesitancy, declining infection and death rates, and general pandemic fatigue are making it tough to sustain the urgency necessary to meet the lofty goal.

Only 1,133 nursing homes—less than 10% of the roughly 15,000 Medicaid- and Medicare-certified facilities—had reached or surpassed the 75% staff vaccination threshold by the end of May, new federal data shows. And only 50% of staff have been inoculated at nursing homes that have provided the recently required vaccination data.

We all know how the pandemic ravaged many of the SNFs, and the article offers this: “Nursing homes and other long-term care facilities have been the epicenter of the Covid-19 outbreak, accounting for nearly 184,000 deaths and more than 1.4 million infections as of May 10, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Infected staffers are believed to be the cause of much of the carnage.”

Facilities are taking various measures to increase the vaccination rates amongst staff. Some are doing one on one counseling, others are opting to require vaccination as a condition of employment.  What are the barriers to vaccination? “Along with concerns about the vaccines’ rapid development and potential side effects, [staff] reluctance to get the shots reflects a combination of misinformation, cultural distrust of the medical profession, and a growing anti-vaccine sentiment that’s taken hold across the country…. [with such] hesitancy [continuing] even though more than 1,900 nursing home workers have died from Covid-19, while nearly 585,000 have been infected, federal data shows.” Some facilities are offering incentives.  One helpful resource, “[t]he Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has produced a how-to, best practices guide to building vaccine confidence among CNAs.”