The Greene County Medical Center recently announced that all staff are required to be fully vaccinated by November 1st, and the hospital’s top official believes this is the right move.

Interim CEO Brian Benson says there were several factors that were considered before the decision was made to require all staff to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Those factors included conversations with other healthcare institutions and hospitals, long term care and the vaccine mandates from the Biden Administration to have all staff working in long term care to be required to be vaccinated, increasing COVID-19 positive cases, as well as the effectiveness of the vaccine.

Currently, 74-percent of all full time and part time staff at the medical center is fully vaccinated and Benson explains what happens if a staff member isn’t fully vaccinated by the November 1st deadline.

“If somebody is not fully vaccinated it would follow similar to what we do for our influenza vaccine, the unfortunate thing would be a voluntary termination. And we certainly do not want any of that to happen. We understand that this is a hot button (topic) if you will, and people are feeling forced into this. We’d rather not have anybody leave. We value all of our team on this. But that’s a choice that employees may be having to make.”

Benson shares his concerns about the healthcare industry already being understaffed and whether or not certain departments or services may have to temporarily stop.

“That’s a remote possibility. We may have to shuffle some folks around. We’ve been doing that through this entire pandemic. Again our teams have been phenomenal on helping out in other departments and sharing the workload. And we would hope that doesn’t happen and that we’re able to continue to care for the patients in the community.”

Benson believes the medical center is the first rural hospital to require the vaccine for all its staff. He adds the decision to require the vaccine has support from the providers with Greene County Family Medicine Clinic, UnityPoint Health, the medical center leadership team and the hospital’s Board of Trustees.