The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has spelled out the best way to ensure providers who work in your urgent care center heed the advice they’re supposed to be giving patients (in short, Get a flu shot). It’s a simple one: Tell them they have to, and make it easy for them to.
The CDC just released data for last year’s flu season on the influence of employer-imposed requirements to receive an influenza vaccination among healthcare personnel in hospitals, ambulatory care settings (which includes urgent care centers, in the CDC’s organizing of settings), and other settings (including, but not limited to, retail clinics and public health settings).
In every setting, compliance approached 100% when the provider’s employer imposed a rule saying all healthcare personnel had to get a flu shot and made it available on site for at least 1 day; the rate fell to roughly half that without the requirement and ready availability across the board, as seen here.
If you expect patients to get a flu shot, it makes sense to encourage providers to follow the philosophy of “physician, heal thyself” instead of “do as I say, not as I do.”
