HOLLYWOOD, FLA. (WSVN) - As COVID-19 patients overwhelm South Florida hospitals, two healthcare systems are making moves when it comes to the vaccine.
Baptist Health and Memorial Healthcare are requiring all employees to get their shots.
Memorial Healthcare’s CEO made the announcement Monday.
“Hello, my name is Aurelio Fernandez, and I’m the president and CEO of Memorial Healthcare System, and we’re mandating all of our employees to get vaccinated,” he said. “We have to stop the spread of this virus. Please do your part.”
Memorial Health employees have an Oct. 1 deadline, while Baptist Health has Oct. 31.
And at Baptist, employees run the risk of termination if they don’t get their shot.
“They are going up. They are going up in every single one of our systems in South Florida, and I would assume in South Florida as a whole,” said Justin Senior, CEO of Safety Net Hospital Alliance of Florida. “You can see in our numbers that the hospitalizations are overwhelmingly driven by unvaccinated adults.”
Senior’s company oversees the state’s largest hospitals, such as Jackson Memorial Hospital, Memorial Health, and Broward Health Medical Center.
“The overall hospital census of adults and children is rising,” Senior said. “If I had to say where the epicenter was in South Florida, it is right on that Broward-Miami-Dade line, and Memorial has the highest census of any of our hospitals in the region.”
Florida has 15,962 people hospitalized with COVID; 3,357 are in the ICU; and 184 are pediatric COVID patients.
“[Delta] is a really contagious variant,” Senior said. “You got this very small segment of the population in Miami-Dade, which is the unvaccinated adults, and they are driving this hospitalization surge.”
With hospitals surging, healthcare workers are at their limit.
“What’s really an issue right now is staffing, pure and simple,” Senior said. “The numbers are getting so high that it’s putting an immense amount of pressure on staff. The most important thing that you can do, I think at this point, is to get vaccinated. You’re either going to get the vaccine or get COVID.”
Memorial said staff must be vaccinated by Oct. 1, and they clearly stated they will have to adhere to extra precautions if they don’t get the vaccine, such as wearing masks in common areas.
“It is imperative to maintain a safe environment, not only in the hospitals but also to the community at large,” said Fernandez.
Both hospital systems will make medical and religious exceptions.
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