Require vaccines for health care workers

While we await the outcome of legal challenges to New York State’s vaccine mandate for health care workers, the fact remains that vaccination is society’s best defense against COVID-19. Long Island's hospitals remain firm in their support of full health care workforce vaccination to keep our staff, patients and communities safe.

We need all health care workers to remain healthy and on the job. The workforce is stretched thin after 19 long, hard months of treating COVID patients. The fatigue and stress is palpable. In the early days of the pandemic, health care employees worked double shifts, sometimes did not see relatives for days, and watched patients separated from their families die.

We need everyone vaccinated, so health care workers and the community are protected.

Patients who have had heart attacks or strokes, are in treatment for cancer or having babies still need hospital beds, too. Every employee plays a part in the care of these patients. Unvaccinated staff who contract COVID or are quarantined due to community exposure further thin the ranks and stress the health care system.

Vaccine mandates are controversial, but they are not new. Hospital workers already are required under state statute to have a variety of vaccinations as a condition of employment, including for measles, mumps and rubella. Mandates have been upheld by the Supreme Court since 1905 when smallpox vaccination was challenged.

Demand for workers in health care, one of the fastest-growing sectors of the economy, was already high before the pandemic. It has been a challenge to fill many positions. Unvaccinated health care workers who choose to leave the profession rather than get vaccinated will exacerbate the situation and further burden the remaining doctors, nurses, technicians and others who have heroically soldiered through the past year and a half. At its worst, a shortage could force hospitals to postpone some services and procedures, increase wait times at emergency rooms and result in the suspension of services and programs.

We hope that with each day more health care workers choose to get vaccinated. As we work toward that goal, the hospital industry has forwarded some short-term solutions the state can put in place to guard against further taxing the health care system and its workforce, since we need all hands on deck.

Among the recommendations:

• Requiring new hires in health care and all other industries be vaccinated against COVID-19.
• Recommending that the state Education Department expedite the approval and renewal of professional licenses, especially for registered nurses.
• Urging the state to institute emergency regulations to alleviate staff shortages in clinical labs and other stressed clinical departments.
• Allowing professionals to work at their full scope of practice so they can use every skill for which they’ve been trained, such as allowing EMTs to provide services in other settings like hospitals, or allowing other trained clinicians to order COVID tests or perform immunizations.

We urge the renewal of many of the workforce flexibilities that former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo authorized in a series of executive orders last year and that have now expired.

COVID-19 is a virus unlike any we have ever seen. Vaccination is the only way to stay ahead of it. It will continue to mutate and strengthen as long as there are hosts to infect. We have the tools — three safe and effective vaccines — to prevent the next variant from emerging.

When we knew little about how to treat COVID and had few resources to prevent its spread, health care workers rushed toward danger anyway. We need their leadership again, but this time to rush toward what we know works: a highly effective vaccine.

No one, not even hospital workers, needs to risk serious illness, hospitalization or death.

This guest essay reflects the views of Wendy Darwell, president and chief executive of Suburban Hospital Alliance of New York State.