PORT ANGELES — Doctors, nurses or any other Olympic Medical Center employee in direct contact with patients are highly encouraged to get flu shots before every flu season.
Beginning next fall, those who decline to get immunized may be required to wear a mask.
“We want to protect our patients, particularly the older patients, and particularly at times when we as health care workers may not even know that we’re infectious because we’re not exhibiting the symptoms,” said Dr. Scott Kennedy, OMC’s chief medical officer, in a report to the commissioners Wednesday.
76 percent
Last flu season, 76 percent of health care workers at OMC were immunized for the seasonal flu and the H1N1 pandemic flu.
That’s “admirable,” Kennedy said, but OMC officials want to see that number climb even higher.
In the coming months, Kennedy will recommend a change in OMC’s vaccination policy to the seven-member governing board to require masks for non-immunized staff.
“Every institution that has done this has boosted their vaccination rate from the 60s and 70s up into to the 98-plus percent level,” Kennedy said.
“That’s what we want to do here. Immunization against influenza is considered the cornerstone of protecting the patients in the institution.”
Flu protection program
OMC has a flu protection program with readily available masks, hand sanitizer, flu pamphlets and signs around the Port Angeles hospital and its satellite clinics.
While all that helps, Kennedy said, the No. 1 way to protect patients is to immunize health care workers.
Commissioner Jim Leskinovitch asked Kennedy if OMC had floated the idea of requiring masks past the unions that represent the employees.
It had not, Kennedy said, but other hospitals have.
“Our feeling is that we will get fairly broad support,” he said.
Earlier in the twice-monthly meeting in Link-letter Hall in the basement of the hospital, the board approved the lease of a mobile GE magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, machine.
Summer replacement
The mobile MRI will be used this summer when OMC replaces an older, smaller MRI machine and puts the new one on line.
In March, the commissioners approved a $1.2 million GE MRI machine for the Port Angeles hospital. The old equipment will be sold or traded in.
“We’re taking out the old one, and we’re putting in the new one,” said Pamela Hawney, assistant administrator in specialty services.”
“And that process takes two months.”
OMC’s Audit and Budget Committee recommended the lease, and the board passed it unanimously.
“We can’t do without it,” Board Chairman John Beitzel said.
The total cost of the two-month lease is $87,912.
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Reporter Rob Ollikainen can be reached at 360-417-3537 or at rob.ollikainen@peninsuladailynews.com.
