Nursing home staffs lag behind in vaccinations
Despite the devastation COVID19 has wrought in Pennsylvania nursing homes over the past year, with thousands of residents dead and more than 14,000 staff members infected, nearly half the workers in those homes have not been vaccinated.
Just 53% of them have been fully vaccinated, along with 79% of residents, according to Pennsylvania Department of Health data released Thursday that also included vaccination rates for nearly all of the state’s 692 nursing homes. It was collected through a statewide survey begun last month.
Those low figures perplex experts and nursing home administrators alike — and are upsetting to family members.
“How can we be living this and doing this every day and people still don’t take this seriously?” Marilyn Walsh, director of marketing for Baptist Homes, a nursing homein Mt. Lebanon, said Friday.
Baptist Homes suffered a COVID-19 outbreak over the winter that killed 32 of its nearly 100 residents. Despite that, only 123 of the home’s 182 staff — or 67% --
were vaccinated, even with Baptist Homes offering every staff member $50 to get vaccinated.
The state figures were lower than data on nursing homes released last month to the Post-Gazette by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
That data showed 95.4% of residents and 66.9% of staff had been vaccinated in the federal pharmacy partnership.
The CDC’s data did not include numbers from nursing homes in Philadelphia — which have a separate partnership from the rest of the state — or from about 40 other homes that did not participate in the partnership the state set up. It was not clear why the figures were so different, and the CDC did not respond to emailed questions.
The state’s data also was different than results from a survey of
83 nursing and personal care and assisted living homes conducted by the Pennsylvania Health Care Association, which represents many long-term care facilities.
The PHCA’s survey results — released earlier this week — showed that in those 83 homes, 85% of nursing home residents and 97% of personal care home residents had been vaccinated, and about 63% of staff in both types of homes had received shots.
PHCA spokesman Eric Heisler said in emailed answers to questions that his organization saw problems with the state’s data, including some facilities with vaccination rates above 100%, and also a problem with the state not including numbers of staff or residents still seeking to be vaccinated.
“What was not included in the state’s release of their data, nor was it answered during the press conference when asked, was how many residents and workers continued to need or are seeking access to the vaccine after the Federal Pharmacy Partnership program concluded,” he wrote. “We know the state’s survey specifically asked the question of providers, but the data was not shared. That was the primary reason we conducted our survey.”
If the 27 facilities with more than 100% vaccination rates among residents were removed, the overall vaccination rate among residents drops to 76%. Only one facility had a vaccination rate over 100% for staff. In some facilities, there could be more than a 100% vaccination rate because of a change in the number of people living or working in the facility over time, or it could simply be a data-entry error.
Pam Walz, supervising attorney for Community Legal Services, a Philadelphia nonprofit that advocates for seniors, said she was pleased that the state released its figures because now residents and their families can know more about the situation they’re living in or considering.
“If I were somebody who needed to go into a facility — maybe I had a stroke and needed rehabilitation in a nursing home — I would want to know if [staff] are vaccinated or not,” Ms. Walz said.
She said residents should know which staff members have been vaccinated or not, although families that Community Legal Services has worked with have been told the information is private.
“Certainly the residents themselves deserve to know” in case they or a family member are going to be exposed to them, she said.
Jodi Gill, whose father, Glenn, is a resident of Brighton Rehabilitation and Wellness Center, which had one of the deadliest COVID-19 outbreaks in the state with
at least 82 people dying during an outbreak last year, was upset to learn that only 44% of Brighton’s 490 staff members had been vaccinated and just 67% of its 315 residents.
“That is infuriating,” she said Friday. “To me, that goes to negligence. You have a duty [as a staff member] to protect your residents.”
Moreover, she said, “These are staff members [who didn’t take the vaccine] who have told us about how devastating it was to see their residents die, and they’re not doing anything proactively to stop it.”
Brighton officials did not respond to emailed questions sent Thursday about the nursing home’s vaccination rates.
Ms. Walsh said she has heard from Baptist Homes staffers that some were afraid of the vaccine and
others thought they had some immunity because they already had contracted COVID-19. In addition to 78 residents there becoming infected, 76 of the staff did, too.
But as Ms. Walz said, the notion of not being able to be reinfected “is not true: You can be.”
Experts recommend that people should get vaccinated even if they had been previously infected with COVID19.
Keara Klinepeter, executive deputy secretary of the Department of Health, said during a news conference Thursday to outline the state’s ongoing efforts to vaccinate staff and residents in long-term care facilities that the survey did not ask nursing homes why staff or residents did not take the vaccine.
“Anecdotally, what we heard is there were a number of staff who didn’t want to be the first to get vaccinated,” she said. “They wanted to see their colleagues, their families, get vaccinated, and then they were willing to get vaccinated.”
The survey and collection of vaccination rates by facility was aimed at getting more of those staff and residents vaccinated, and figuring out the most efficient way to do that.
To that end, Ms. Klinepeter said, the state will help organize additional vaccination clinics at nursing homes, either through existing federal pharmacy partnership providers or by authorizing new pharmacies to do the clinics.
Ms. Walsh said that in addition to the $50 that Baptist Homes is offering staff, it is doing all it can to educate them about why they should be vaccinated.
“We’ve been doing all sorts of education,” she said. “I can’t understand why they wouldn’t [get vaccinated]. But it’s people’s choices and maybe they have other health concerns.”
Baptist Homes has already set up two clinics — one next week and another a month later — to try to get more staff members vaccinated, while also inviting in family members of staff and residents. So far 20 people had signed up.