WA rural hospitals taking hardest hit with worker exodus from COVID vaccine mandate
On the state’s COVID-19 vaccination deadline day for hospital workers, estimates of those leaving the industry were not yet clear.
Anecdotally via examples given during a Monday, Oct. 18, roundtable statewide hospital briefing, it is expected that rural, particularly Eastern Washington hospitals, will be more affected than the rest of the state.
Enforcement of the mandate was allowed to proceed Monday after a Thurston County Superior Court judge denied a request for a temporary injunction.
During Monday’s news briefing hosted by the Washington State Hospital Association, Cassie Sauer, CEO of the Washington State Hospital Association, said that estimates still ranged between 2% and 5% from the association’s initial survey of those leaving their jobs after the Oct. 18 deadline.
“That actually may be, honestly a high estimate,” Sauer noted, as the association learned of more workers moving to get their vaccines and those already vaccinated not accounted for.
Whatcom County’s St. Joseph hospital is seeing nearly full compliance with the statewide COVID-19 vaccination mandate, officials told The Bellingham Herald for an earlier story.
“Staffing levels are where they need to be to care for the patients we serve,” St. Joseph spokeswoman Bev Mayhew told The Herald in an Oct. 4 email.
Some 3,026 of PeaceHealth’s 3,200 in Whatcom County employees — including the hospital medical and clinics — were vaccinated by Oct. 4, Mayhew said, for a vaccination rate of 95%.
About 2,200 of those people work at St. Joseph.
Mayhew said 123 medical and religious exemptions were granted, a number that represents about 4% of all employees.
She said 21 people “across all job classes and across the medical center and clinics resigned or retired, citing the vaccine requirement as the reason. No one has been dismissed.”
In the University of Washington medical system, workers who had started their vaccines and still not fully vaccinated and past their two-week waiting period for full efficacy of the final dose were moved to administrative leave for upward of 45 days to avoid firing/rehiring process, according to Dr. Tim Dellit, chief medical officer, UW Medicine.
Others facing denial of exemption also could take administrative leave to take action to come into compliance, he noted.
“After today, we when you look at our staff, our medical staff and our trainees are at roughly 99 percent vaccinated,” Dellit said, “so we’re extremely happy with that number. At the same time, it means that we probably have about 220 staff who won’t be with us after today.”
“What was interesting is that those who had their exemption request denied, the majority went on to start the vaccination series. And so overall we have seen this increase in vaccination rates through this mandate,” he said.
Most of the hospital representatives on Monday’s call noted that the loss of workers already had been taking place before the deadline. The losses were not just because of the vaccine mandate, but because of early retirements, people leaving for traveling positions, and in some cases to escape the workload.
Reza Kaleel, chief executive for Kadlec Health System serving the Tri-Cities area, said the system had lost “nearly a quarter of our ICU staff,” for those mix of reasons. “But the pandemic, in one way, shape or form, usually is part of that.”
“And everyone’s in the same situation with the hospitals virtually all competing with each other now across the country for a staff,” Kaleel added.
In other cases, the mandate did cause an exodus, particularly among support staff at rural hospitals.
“This last week, we lost almost our entire materials management department because specifically to the mandate,” said Dr. Andrea Carter, chief medical officer for 50-bed Samaritan Healthcare in Moses Lake.
Materials management handles ordering supplies, such as personal protective equipment, for staff.
Before that, Carter added, the hospital had lost seven workers to the mandate.
“We rely fairly heavily on staffing agencies where we’re at. We don’t have a huge pool of staff, otherwise. And with the cost of those staffing agency contracts that is hurting us a little bit,” Carter said.
“We will see curtailing of services, there’s no question about that,” Sauer said of rural hospitals particularly in Eastern Washington, with caps on admissions and longer waits for elective or non-urgent procedures in those locations.
Statewide, COVID-19 cases in hospitals are declining but at a slow pace, Sauer noted, with 1,025 COVID positive patients in hospitals compared to 1,101 the same time last week.
The numbers are ventilators statewide remain relatively the same with 184 this week, compared with 185 last week, and an average of 10-15 COVID deaths a week.
This story was originally published October 18, 2021 at 12:00 AM.
