About 50 employees of a network of hospitals, Essentia Health, noting thanksgiving is clearly not able to think of a good, because on Wednesday, they were fired for refusing to get a flu shot.
Requirements for workers regarding vaccination from the flu, are rapidly spreading trend. Experts in the field of health claim it should not be surprising.
«It’s a matter of patient safety,» said NBC’s Dr. William Shaffner, infectious disease expert from Vanderbilt University and the representative of the Society of infectious diseases of America. «We should not spread the disease to our patients.»
«Patients are in hospital because they’re sick,» says Dr. Rajesh Prabhu, a specialist in infectious diseases and a specialist in service quality and patient safety at Essentia Health. «This puts them at risk in connection with the possibility of a more serious outcome. People can die from flu.»
Every year the influenza virus kills between 4,000 to 50,000 Americans, including children, who were perfectly healthy before they get infected. Center for control and prevention of diseases annually encourages vaccination of everyone age 6 months, unless the patient has no major contraindications, such as Allergy to the vaccine.
However, the number of people still decide to get a flu shot is not as great as I would like. Even among health workers there are only about 65%. In medical institutions where the management wants staff to be vaccinated vaccinated against influenza of employees is about 85%. There, where not a mandatory requirement of only 43%.
Employees of Essentia Health fired immediately. They were given a period during which they could change their minds and vaccinated or to justify the denial of religious or philosophical beliefs.
Only 50 of the 14,000 employees of the network of hospitals refused to vaccinate, without explaining why.
