Half of Kentucky’s nursing home employees aren’t vaccinated. Biden is requiring it.
Of the nearly 100 people who work at Landmark of Lancaster Rehabilitation and Nursing Center in Garrard County, barely one in five were vaccinated against COVID-19 as of two weeks ago, according to federal data.
“Some of them have been reluctant,” acknowledged Austin Gibson, the facility’s director, on Thursday. “Overall for our employees, we are still working very hard, trying to encourage them to get the vaccine.”
The numbers will have to improve dramatically at Landmark of Lancaster, and soon.
On Wednesday, President Joe Biden ordered the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to draft an emergency rule requiring the 1.3 million employees of the nation’s 15,000 nursing homes to be vaccinated. Nursing homes that don’t comply will forfeit their federal funds, which is an essential source of industry revenue.
“These steps are all about keeping people safe and out of harm’s way,” Biden announced.
Federal data shows that COVID-19 has killed 134,000 nursing home residents and nearly 2,000 employees. But staff at the facilities — who typically got first dibs on the vaccine, ahead of most other Americans — often have proved reluctant to get the shot.
Only 50 percent of Kentucky nursing home employees are vaccinated, according to the most recent federal data, ranking it seventh from last among the states.
A Kentucky lobbyist for nursing homes said Biden’s mandate concerns her because it could push vaccine-hesitant staff out of the industry at a time when facilities already are scrambling to find enough nurses and nurse aides.
“We have an expectation that all of our health care workers receive the COVID-19 vaccine and support employers who are capable of adopting a vaccine mandate,” said Betsy Johnson, president of the Kentucky Association of Health Care Facilities.
However, Johnson added, “the federal mandate will make it impossible for nursing facilities to compete for workforce against other health care providers who do not mandate the COVID-19 vaccine. A better policy solution would be to mandate the vaccine for all health care providers.”
As a practical matter, though, most of Kentucky’s major hospital chains already have adopted a vaccine mandate for their employees, including the University of Kentucky’s hospital system, Baptist Health and CHI Saint Joseph Health.
Kentucky’s state long-term care ombudsman, Sherry Culp, said she hears from nursing home employees who fear the vaccine because they don’t understand it.
“They’re scared of what’s in it,” Culp said. “They believe it’s something completely new. They don’t understand that parts of it were being worked on by scientists for a long period of time even before the pandemic, and they don’t want to put something in their body that’s new and they can’t remove if they discover something bad later.”
Nursing homes can boost their numbers by organizing vaccination education programs for their staffs as well as providing paid time off to get the shot and to recover from any flu-like symptoms they might experience as a result of inoculation, Culp said.
“They need to be supported,” she said. “Some of these people at first said, ‘Forget it, I’m not getting the shot.’ But then they saw their director of nursing get it, and when she didn’t suffer any adverse reactions and maybe it even seemed to help protect her, they started to have second thoughts.”
Gibson, at the Lancaster nursing home, said he believes most of his employees will agree to take the shot, if reluctantly, once they’re facing a deadline that could cost them their jobs. It also will help if the Food and Drug Administration starts giving final approval to the vaccines, as it’s expected to in early September, he said.
“I don’t necessarily think we’re going to lose 80 percent of our staff over this,” Gibson said.
“A lot of our staff has been here for a very long time,” he said. “They are dedicated to this facility and to the residents who live here. I know they want to do right by them.”
This story was originally published August 19, 2021 at 3:53 PM.
