Vaccine-Hesitant Urgent Care Workers May Need Proper—and Personal—Motivation

Urgent care operators (and all healthcare employers) may struggle at times to ensure their teams meet organizational goals for vaccination compliance. Even at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, some healthcare workers (HCWs) flat out refused to get vaccinated. Besides putting themselves and those around them at risk, such individuals provided a poor example for patients who may have been on the fence about getting the shot. New research published in the Journal of Occupational Health offers insights that could be helpful in motivating staff to get vaccinated against flu and, possibly by extension, COVID-19 in the future. Data from a retrospective cohort study of HCWs at a university hospital in Italy showed overall acceptance of free vaccination offered to workers increased from 14.8% to 31.7%. Physicians’ compliance increased by 33.2%, a bigger jump than nonmedical graduate staff (+22.8%), nurses/midwives (17.1%), and administrative/managerial staff (17%). Researchers surmised that educational messages tailored to the individual were most effective in increasing compliance. Overall, the most common reasons cited for vaccination uptake were a desire to protect fragile relatives living together (given by 51.3% of respondents), belonging to a high-risk category (41%), and the desire to protect patients (33%). More than 40% of respondents gave more than one reason.