At least five hospitals across the state are requiring some or all of their employees to be vaccinated, a VTDigger survey found.
The five are Brattleboro Memorial, White River Junction VA Medical Center, Northeastern Vermont Regional Hospital, Mt. Ascutney Hospital and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Southwestern Vermont Region, which offers care through Southwestern Vermont Medical Center in Bennington.
Others — including the University of Vermont Health Network, a system with more than 600 licensed beds in Burlington alone, and its affiliated Central Vermont Medical Center — have not yet decided what policy, if any, to impose. Health network spokesperson Annie Mackin said earlier this week that she expects a decision in the coming days.
In a statement Tuesday, the network said it was “actively moving toward the goal of having our entire workforce of nearly 15,000 employees and physicians in Vermont and northern New York vaccinated against Covid-19.”
“We are taking a thoughtful and intentional approach toward next steps, including whether we will institute a mandatory vaccine policy for all our workforce, and plan to make a decision in the near future,” Mackin said. And, she said, the vast majority of the hospital’s 7,000 clinical and patient-facing staff have already been vaccinated.
Gifford Medical Center in Randolph and Rutland Regional Medical Centers are also undecided, officials said this week.
The vaccine mandate discussions come at a time when many hospitals nationwide are grappling with similar dilemmas fueled by rising Covid-19 cases.
Gov. Phil Scott signaled his support Thursday for facility-specific decisions on vaccine mandates.
The governor “supports hospitals, long-term care facilities and other health care providers requiring their employees to be vaccinated, or mandated masking and weekly testing for the unvaccinated,” said Scott’s press secretary, Jason Maulucci, in a statement Thursday. “We are currently exploring the possibility of state action, including in certain state-run facilities, but no decisions have been made at this time.”
VTDigger confirmed with the Vermont Department of Mental Health that employees at the state psychiatric hospital in Berlin aren’t required to be vaccinated.
Numerous medical associations have also favored vaccine mandates in hospitals.
The Vermont Medical Society, which represents about 2,400 doctors and physicians’ assistants, announced Tuesday it had signed on to a joint statement urging health care employers to mandate vaccinations.
“In Vermont, we are seeing the weekly data correlating our high vaccination rates with low rates of hospitalization and death, even in the face of increasing cases,” said the medical society’s president, Simha Ravven, chief medical officer of the Burlington-based Howard Center. “We cannot let our state go backwards in our fight against the new Delta strain, and vaccinating all health care workers will continue to save lives in Vermont.”
“I think we need to be role models,” said Meredith Roberts, executive director of the Vermont chapter of the American Nurses Association. “We need to exemplify what we expect. If we’re good role models and we’re showing that, yes, we are vaccinated, this is the approved way, it’s the most ethical way to show (patients), ‘Look I did it, and I’m not turning into a mutant.’”
The Vermont Association of Hospitals and Health Systems has not yet commented on the matter publicly, and association representatives did not respond to requests for comment this week.
Other professional associations are supporting vaccine mandates in medical facilities. The New Hampshire Hospital Association, for instance, has released a statement in support of vaccine mandates.
Workforce implications
But vaccine mandates are proving a thorny issue in a pandemic that’s already squeezing medical staff. Hospital leaders in the Green Mountain State have thus far been cautious with policies that may alienate their own workforce in this highly vaccinated state.
“At the end of the day, there’s no specific risk that we’re looking to mitigate,” said Kevin Robinson, spokesperson at Rutland Regional Medical Center, a 144-bed hospital. “Is it worth the potential upset among staff that a mandate causes? Those are things that have to be weighed in the context of a vaccine mandate.”
In other states, particularly those with significant Delta variant spikes, mandates have sparked lawsuits, protests and opposition among some health care workers.
Dartmouth-Hitchcock, which is based in Lebanon, N.H., and has two hospitals in Vermont, said earlier this week that, by Sept. 30, all employees are expected to be vaccinated “as a condition of employment.”
Management at Northeastern Vermont Regional Hospital, a 25-bed medical center in St. Johnsbury, is balancing employee wishes with public health by making the mandate contingent on full vaccine approval by the Food and Drug Administration.
“We want to be mindful of the employees who may be hesitant,” said hospital spokesperson Betty Ann Gwatkin. “We care about how our employees feel. But we are also a health care institution and patients are the whole reason we’re here, so it’s patients first.”
The vaccines, which now have emergency authorization, are slated to move through the regulatory hurdles quickly. The FDA has accelerated the approval process and anticipates approving the Pfizer vaccine in early September. Biotech company Moderna is slated to file for FDA approval for its vaccine in the coming weeks.
Still evaluating
Other institutions in Vermont are reluctant to impose sweeping policies.
Brattleboro Memorial Hospital, a 61-bed facility, put a limited mandate in place, focusing only on new hires. Management is still evaluating additional requirements on existing staff, hospital spokesperson Gina Pattison said in an email Wednesday.
Pattison did not answer follow-up questions about the rationale behind the policy, but said hospital administrators would use guidance on the issue from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The federal government, for its part, isn’t planning to impose a nationwide vaccine mandate, but clinical staff at Veterans Affairs hospitals are required to be vaccinated, the agency announced last month. The policy extends to all VA facilities and clinics, including the 74-bed hospital in White River Junction.
With states setting much of public health policy, federal authorities have said states and employers can put forth their own vaccination mandates. Employers and politicians are divided on the matter. New Jersey, for example, will require all health care workers in the state to be vaccinated, effective Sept. 7.
At least one Vermont hospital has skirted the issue by changing other policies. Peter Albert, lobbyist for the Brattleboro Retreat, said the largest psychiatric hospital in Vermont is requiring universal masking but isn’t mandating vaccinations.
Wendy Franklin, spokesperson for North Country Hospital, said Thursday that vaccine mandates are under discussion.
“We do have a 90 percent employee vaccination rate for Covid vaccines,” she said. “We’re pretty pleased that our staff has stepped up to the plate and many new employees are vaccinating as they come in, so we’re going in the right direction.”
