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UNM Hospital employees have filed a complaint against UNMH administration about its decision to make flu vaccines mandatory for all staff.
On Thursday, UNMH union members released their “Prohibitive Practices Complaint” against the hospital in order to negotiate the terms of the mandate and how employees will be affected. The complaint will be heard in front of the UNM Labor Board on Tuesday.
Nurse Lorie MacIver, President for the License and Technical section of District 1199 NM, a local union for health care employees, said her union filed the complaint because employees were not allowed to negotiate the terms beforehand.
“This is not a stance against immunization against the flu,” she said. “This is really a stance against employers not respecting their employees’ rights to bargain when they have an existing contract.”
After flu shot clinics opened in September, hospital employees were sent a memo informing them that flu vaccinations would be mandatory this year. The hospital would like all employees to be vaccinated by Dec. 1.
Though other vaccinations are required for all staff according to UNMH contracts, flu vaccines had always been available free to employees, but optional, MacIver said.
David Pitcher, chief medical officer of UNMH, said because UNMH already has flu shots available to the public for free, the hospital would not charge employees more. He estimates over 70 percent of UNMH staff has already received the shot, according to their records.
MacIver said she had already gotten her shot this season.
Pitcher said mandatory flu vaccines was not an administrative decision, but instead a question of the practice of medicine by medical staff, therefore not requiring work negotiations.
There will be special exemptions for people with egg allergies or who have had a significant reaction to the shot before, as well as religious exemptions, Pitcher said. He said he expects that the exemptions would not be too difficult to attain.
“Our goal is to get as many of our health care workforce vaccinated as possible,” he said. “But our goal is not to dig deep into anyone’s personal history or background or to require extensive documentation of why they can’t receive it.”
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The paperwork for exemptions needs to be filed with the hospital by Nov. 15, according to the memo. Exempt employees will likely need to wear a facemask, Pitcher said.
Talks about mandating flu vaccines for hospital employees have been happening around the United States and within the UNMH medical staff for the past couple of years, Pitcher said.
“After the H1N1 near-pandemic and so forth, there was a national conversation about ‘Shouldn’t we be doing this for the flu as well?’” Pitcher said. “Flu can have a significant impact on the workforce, and it’s not necessarily a benign disease for patients who are already vulnerable.”
But MacIver said that because talks have been happening for several years, the memo should have come months earlier in order to allow for negotiations.
“We filed (the complaint) because the hospital has known for a long time that flu season comes annually,” she said. “That’s not a big surprise to anybody and yet they waited till the last minute to put this policy in place and force people into receiving the shot.”
MacIver said she had been informed the religious document was fairly difficult to complete and getting proof of an allergy from a physician requires time and medical co-pay.
Her union is especially concerned about people who have never had the shot before having adverse reactions and not being paid the proper benefits or workman’s compensation, MacIver said.
“We want to know, and we wanted the opportunity to bargain that and to have a reasonable discussion that reasonable people should have as to what it would be like should somebody have an adverse reaction,” MacIver said. “That’s our biggest complaint.”
