As more Florida kids are hospitalized for COVID, Nicklaus Children’s mandates vaccine
Nicklaus Children’s Hospital in Miami announced a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for all employees and vendors on Friday as the number of pediatric inpatients hospitalized in Florida with a confirmed case of the disease continued to lead all other states.
Hospital employees, including doctors, nurses, students and others have until Oct. 15 to be fully vaccinated, with those who complete their inoculation by the deadline receiving a $150 reward. Employees who want to request an exemption for medical reasons or religious beliefs must submit a form by Sept. 3.
In a letter to employees on Friday, Nicklaus Children’s CEO Matthew Love said that those who do not comply with the vaccine mandate by Oct. 15 and do not have a qualified exemption will be “subject to progressive corrective action up to and including termination.”
“As advocates for children and our community, we must make the choice to protect the wellbeing of our patients, families and team members,” Love wrote in closing.
Nicklaus Children’s started vaccinating employees in December. Since then, about 70% of the hospital’s 3,886 employees have been fully vaccinated, including a 95% take-up among staff physicians.
Love said in a phone interview that he made the decision to mandate employee inoculation after seeing similar policies adopted at children’s hospitals in Florida and other states, considering the high rate of transmission of COVID-19 in Miami-Dade and surveying employee attitudes about the vaccine.
“Overwhelmingly,” he said, “this was supported throughout the organization.”
Restrictions at Jackson for unvaccinated
The announcement from Nicklaus Children’s follows a rule change at Miami-Dade’s public hospital, Jackson Health System, whose chief executive said Thursday that employees who are not vaccinated must wear N-95 respirator masks at all times while indoors at Jackson Health facilities.
About 60% of Jackson Health’s estimated 13,000 employees are vaccinated, with take-up highest among third-year medical residents (91%), attending physicians (78%) and clinical staff nurses (56%).
But Jackson Health has not announced a vaccine mandate. In fact, most hospital administrators are reluctant to do so for fear that they will lose employees to hospitals that do not compel employees to get vaccinated.
The demand for registered nurses with hospital experience is high due to a years-long nursing shortage, which the pandemic has worsened. Many are burned out after 18 months of the pandemic while others have left local hospitals for more lucrative travel work in other states.
Love said he hopes not to lose any nurses due to the new mandate. “They’re the heart of Nicklaus,” he said.
Florida hospitals mandating vaccines among staff
Only one other South Florida hospital has mandated vaccination for employees: Holy Cross Health in Fort Lauderdale.
In North Florida, two hospital systems have announced vaccine mandates for employees: the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville and Ascension, which operates hospitals from Pensacola to the Jacksonville area. The Mayo Clinic has set a deadline of Sept. 17 for all employees to be fully vaccinated but Ascension is giving employees until Nov. 12 to do so.
Increasingly, hospitals around the country are mandating vaccines for their workers, according to the trade publication, Becker’s Hospital Review, which publishes a list of medical centers that require inoculation of employees.
This week, the California Department of Public Health issued an order that all healthcare workers be vaccinated, not just at hospitals but also nursing homes, outpatient surgery centers and other clinical settings.
And the Department of Veterans Affairs, which employs 115,000 people, mandated inoculation for all of its healthcare workers on July 28, giving employees eight weeks to get fully vaccinated or face possible termination.
Cases, hospitalizations rising
Nicklaus Children’s executives said they felt compelled to mandate vaccination for employees amid a rapid resurgence of the pandemic, with COVID-related infections and hospitalizations rising among young patients.
On Friday, Nicklaus Children’s reported 23 pediatric inpatients with COVID-19, including seven in an intensive care unit. None of the patients were vaccinated.
Although cases have spiked across all age groups in Florida in the past month, a Miami Herald analysis of weekly case data revealed that the sharpest increase over the past month has occurred among kids under 12.
On Friday, the Department of Health and Human Services reported 157 pediatric inpatients at Florida hospitals with a confirmed case of COVID-19 — more than any other state.
While Florida has seen a spike in infections and hospitalizations among children, the American Academy of Pediatrics has reported that after declining in early summer child cases have risen in July.
Almost 72,000 cases were added during the week ending July 29, a significant increase from the prior week, when about 39,000 cases were reported, according to the AAP report.
“Since the pandemic began, children represented 14.3% of total cumulated cases,” the report said. “For the week ending July 29, children were 19% of reported weekly COVID-19 cases.”
Despite the increase, the AAP emphasized that “the available data indicate that COVID-19-associated hospitalization and death is uncommon in children.”
Still, South Florida children’s hospital emergency room doctors have reported seeing more symptomatic children with COVID-19 than they did during the surges in spring and summer of 2020.
They attribute the rise in pediatric hospital admissions to the more contagious delta variant of the virus that causes COVID-19 — which produces a viral load that is roughly 1,000 times higher than the original coronavirus strain — and the low rate of vaccination among those younger than 20.
About 38% of Florida residents ages 12 to 19 years old have received at least one dose of the vaccine compared with 85% among residents 65 and older, according to Florida health department data.
