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Clockwise from top left: YNHHS VP Vin Petrini, CEO Marna Borgstrom, and Chief Medical Officer Thomas Balcezak.
Yale New Haven Health will soon require all 28,000-plus of its employees to be vaccinated against Covid-19. It’s already 81 percent there.
Yale New Haven Health System (YNHSS) CEO Marna Borgstrom and Chief Medical Officer Thomas Balcezak detailed that vaccination-mandate plan Wednesday during the regional hospital system’s latest virtual press conference, held online via Zoom and Facebook Live.
Borgstrom and Balcezak said that the hospital system — which includes seven hospital campuses between Bridgeport and Westerly, R.I., including two in New Haven on York Street and at the former St. Raphael’s Hospital — will require all of its medical and non-medical staff to get vaccinated against Covid-19.
YNHHS VP Vin Petrini said that the regional hospital system currently employees 28,589 people. Roughly 81 percent — or more than 23,000 — of those employees are already vaccinated.
“We have not decided precisely when we will require people to get the vaccination by,” Borgstrom said. She said YNHHS will announce that vaccination-by date in the next week or two. “We do feel that we have an obligation to keep our patients, our visitors, and one another safe.”
“We are now looking for how we can create a mandatory vaccination policy that is appropriate, scientifically based, and allows for exemptions for healthcare-related reasons,” added Balcezak.
Vaccine mandates for hospital employees are not new, even at YNHHS, Balcezak said. “We require staff to be vaccinated against many commonly transmissible diseases, including influenza.”
How will this mandate be enforced? For now, TBD, Balcezak said.
“When we do the flu vaccine, we work through our occupational health colleagues and we create a list of those who have not yet been vaccinated, give them and their managers fair notice, create opportunities” for people to get vaccinated, explain how people can get vaccinated, and then “have consequences for those whose exemptions are rejected but still refuse to get vaccinated.”
One likely consequence would be removing unvaccinated workers “out of direct patient care,” he said. Balcezak said YNHHS may also require unvaccinated workers to get tested weekly.
Borgstrom said that the regional hospital system currently has only 13 Covid-positive inpatients: six in New Haven, six in Bridgeport, one in Greenwich. The hospital system has treated more than 13,300 Covid patients, 1,227 of whom have died.
And what about the new Delta variant currently running rampant around the world, and rising in prevalence in New York and Massachusetts?
Balcezak said the best way to protect oneself and one’s community from the Delta variant — and from all strains of the novel coronavirus — is to get vaccinated.
“Vaccination does confer immunity to all variants,” he said, “including the Delta variant. To the extent that we can continue to push the numbers and percentages of folks in the state who are vaccinated higher and higher, then the Delta variant poses less of a risk.”