Why Some Hospitals Are Dropping Vaccine Mandates For Healthcare Workers

Hospitals across the U.S. are doing away with their vaccine mandates as a result of a persistent shortage of healthcare workers, according to a report Monday in The Wall Street Journal.

Hospital chains and nonprofit hospitals are dropping the mandate in a bid to hold on to staff members who range from nurses to sanitation workers. Medical professionals are reporting high rates of burnout and frustration with shortages of necessary equipment to do their jobs.

"It’s been a mass exodus, and a lot of people in the healthcare industry are willing to go and shop around,” employee-benefits lawyer Wade Symons told the Journal. "If you get certain healthcare facilities that don’t require it, those could be a magnet for those people who don’t want the vaccine. They’ll probably have an easier time attracting labor."

According to the Department of Labor, 524,000 healthcare workers left the workforce in February 2020, the month before the pandemic began to spread. In September, the department said 38,000 workers left the healthcare field, the largest of any single field that month.

Vaccine mandates only added to the flight of healthcare workers as a number of them refused to comply. The Biden administration issued a new rule on Nov. 4 that required staff at hospitals that participate in Medicaid and Medicare programs to be fully vaccinated by Jan. 4, 2022. This rule was estimated to apply to 17,000 workers in this sector, but it was put on hold by a federal judge on Nov. 30.

Beyond resistance to the mandate, hospitals are also being hit by market forces that have increased the competition for labor.

Pay for nursing jobs has climbed 4% in the last year as healthcare providers try to hold their workforces together. Competition between employers seeking workers and shorter-term staffing agencies has also seen a number of nurses gravitate toward the latter.

In February, it was estimated by the American Nursing Association that there is an estimated need for 1.1 million nurses and it has urged the federal government to declare the shortage a national emergency.