The California Department of Public Health issued an order Aug. 5 requiring healthcare workers to be vaccinated, citing increasing COVID-19 hospitalizations in the state.
This order requires workers in hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, intermediate care facilities and ASCs to be fully vaccinated or receive their second shot by Sept. 30.
Workers may be exempt from the vaccination requirement for religious beliefs or qualifying medical reasons.
"I fully support this mandate," Robert Szabo, MD, professor of orthopaedics and surgery at Sacramento, Calif.-based UC Davis Health, told Becker's. "I think those in healthcare who do not vaccinate are irresponsible. We should be held to the highest standard of protecting each other and our patients."
Trudy Wiig, RN, administrator of Kerlan-Jobe Surgery Center in Los Angeles, expects to implement the mandate with ease. Her center has been testing unvaccinated workers for COVID-19 twice weekly since early February.
"The strength of the state’s requirements, barring medical exemption or religious accommodation, bolster our current policies," she told Becker's. "We will have 99 percent of our staff and physicians fully vaccinated a few weeks before the state’s September 30 deadline."
While she expects the mandate could cost money — through requirements to "view the card, photo of the cards and physician office test results on letterhead" — Ms. Wiig said she believes it's necessary.
"That is a new ripple we’ll take in stride to protect ourselves, our patients and the movement of people in and around in the center from those with nefarious intentions," she said.
Some healthcare workers feel the mandate is necessary to stop the spread.
"We failed to sufficiently vaccinate the population and now we are seeing the downside of that, the emergence of COVID-19 variants," said Robert Mayle, MD, an orthopedic surgeon based in San Francisco and affiliated with Sutter Health in Sacramento. "If we are to achieve immunity and finally put this pandemic behind us, then we must vaccinate all."