COVID-19 vaccination rates plummet among nursing home personnel
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Key takeaways:
- The COVID-19 vaccination rate among nursing home personnel fell to 10.5% last season.
- Influenza vaccine coverage also was low but far outpaced COVID-19 vaccine uptake.
There was a “marked decrease” in COVID-19 vaccine uptake among nursing home personnel last season, according to researchers, who attributed the decline to cost and the end of the CMS’s COVID-19 vaccine requirement in mid-2023.
The rate of influenza vaccination was also low among nursing home personnel, but four times higher than uptake of the new COVID-19 vaccines, the researchers reported in MMWR.
Dozens of societies and organizations representing medical personnel have endorsed mandatory COVID-19 vaccination among heath care personnel, including the Infectious Diseases Society of America, Association for Professionals in Infection Control and
Epidemiology (APIC) and Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA), along with other ID-focused groups.
IDSA, APIC and SHEA have also endorsed making influenza vaccination mandatory among health care personnel.
According to the new report, which is based on data reported to the CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network by acute-care hospitals and nursing homes, just 10% of the 1.8 million health care personnel working in nursing homes in the United States received an updated 2023-2024 COVID-19 vaccine, which was down from around 23% in 2022-2023.
Nursing home residents are at a high risk for severe COVID-19 outcomes.
The data showed that around 15% of the approximately 8 million health care personnel working in acute-care hospitals received one of the updated COVID-19 shots, a decrease of around 2 percentage points from the year before.
Influenza vaccination coverage was around 80% among the 8.8 million health care personnel working in acute-care hospitals and 45% among the 2.1 million health workers in nursing homes, according to the report, comparable to 2023-2024 but down from 2 years ago.
In addition to protecting patients, the authors noted that vaccination among health care workers also “helps maintain a healthy workforce and reduces the risk for staffing shortages.”
“This study identified a marked decrease in COVID-19 vaccination coverage among health care personnel in nursing homes,” the authors wrote. “CMS’s regulatory requirement for vaccination of health care personnel against COVID-19 expired in June 2023 and, in fall 2023, COVID-19 vaccines were commercialized. These two events might have affected vaccination campaigns and on-site access to COVID-19 vaccines in nursing homes, and commercialization of the vaccine increased costs for facilities and health care personnel.”
The authors noted some strategies that have been shown to increase vaccine uptake among health care personnel, including on-site vaccination campaigns.
Collapse
Read more about
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts