Hartford Healthcare Unions Push Back On Required Flu Shots

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Two unions at Hartford Healthcare are objecting to the health network’s new mandatory vaccination policy.

Unions at Windham Hospital in Willimantic and Natchaug Hospital in Mansfield, both part of the Hartford Healthcare network, which includes Hartford Hospital, have pushed back against the network policy — enacted for the first time this year — that requires flu shots for all employees.

The policy allows for medical and religious exemptions, and employees granted these exemptions must wear masks at work until the end of flu season. For now, though, officials at Hartford Healthcare say they’ve made a one-time-only exception for union members at Natchaug and Windham: Members who don’t want flu shots but don’t qualify for a medical or religious exemption can get a “personal exemption” this year. That option won’t be available next year.

More hospitals are beginning to require flu vaccinations. This year, 19 of the state’s 29 acute care hospitals require that all employees get flu shots. That’s a sharp increase from last year, when there were only five.

David Lucier, an official with Local 1199, the union at Natchaug Hospital, said Hartford Healthcare officials have been “heavy-handed” in pushing the new policy. He said 37 employees at Natchaug have refused to get the shot.

“We believe we should have right over our bodies,” Lucier said. “Some people are very serious about that.”

Lucier said union officials also object to the requirement that employees wear a mask if they don’t get the shot, calling it “a scarlet letter.”

“It’s done for ostracization and it’s done to punish and it’s done to give people a reason to get the shot,” Lucier said.

Rocco Orlando, chief medical officer for Hartford Healthcare, said masks aren’t a perfect solution but they do significantly diminish the risk of spreading the flu. He said the two unions are the only ones in the Hartford Healthcare network to take up the issue in collective bargaining.

As far as the legal issues of requiring flu shots for all employees, Orlando said, there’s “a fair amount of disagreement” that’s being worked out in courts in the U.S. “There is not an answer to that question yet,” he said.

Jenae Aguilar, a mental health worker at Natchaug Hospital, said she simply doesn’t want to put vaccines in her body.

“I am a healthy individual and my kids are healthy,” said Aguilar, 28, from Norwich. If she gets the flu, she said, she’ll use her sick days. And since Natchaug Hospital is a psychiatric hospital and not an acute care facility, the patients she deals with aren’t particularly susceptible to influenza.

If anything, Aguilar said, the mask will make her less effective at work.

“I do therapy with kids, and when you talk to someone face to face, you go off facial expressions,” she said. “They’re just going to think ‘What the heck is wrong with this lady?’”

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