Free Republic

High inflation and a shortage of patient clinicians spurred the decision to cut 770 Ochsner Health's CEO said it was 'the hardest change we have ever had to make' Louisiana's largest hospital system has laid off nearly 800 of its staff amid rising healthcare labor costs after the Covid pandemic emergency has come to an end. Ochsner Health announced today it was 'eliminating 770 positions' — around 2 percent of its entire staff — in 'the hardest change we have ever had to make'. It comes after extra money for healthcare systems from the government was cut off after Biden...

Maine health care workers opposed to the COVID-19 vaccine mandate are hoping the U.S. Supreme Court will take the same position a Texas federal court recently took on the Department of Defense’s obligation to approve religious exemptions for active duty veterans.In a brief filed on Jan. 11 on behalf of 2,000 health workers in the Pine Tree state, the national civil liberties organization Liberty Counsel argued that it is discriminatory for hospitals to grant medical exemptions, but not religious ones, to health care workers opposed to taking the COVID jab. “The folks that are getting medical exemptions comparably pose the...

Florida won’t be enforcing the Biden Administration’s mandatory vaccination policy for health care workers upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, a spokeswoman for the governor’s office said Thursday. “The state of Florida is not going to serve as the Biden Administration’s biomedical police,” Christina Pushaw, press secretary for Gov. Ron DeSantis, said in an email to the USA TODAY Network-Florida. “Firing unvaccinated healthcare workers, many of whom have infection-conferred immunity, is unethical and unscientific on its face.” She said it also harms patients “because hospitals in California and other states are now requiring vaccinated, COVID-infected healthcare workers to treat patients...

Thousands of doctors and nurses across the country have been fired in recent months after refusing to take the Wuhan coronavirus vaccine. Northwell Health, which employs more than 76,000 people as New York State’s largest healthcare provider, has fired 1,400 of its workers after they refused to get vaccinated against the coronavirus, the company announced Monday.Now that there's a surge in cases, the CDC is invoking a contingency plan to fill the gap at hospitals and health clinics. "Maintaining appropriate staffing in healthcare facilities is essential to providing a safe work environment for HCP and safe patient care. As the...

A coalition of 10 states has filed a lawsuit aimed at stopping the Biden administration's mandate ordering health care workers at facilities that receive Medicare and Medicaid funding to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt is leading the charge on the lawsuit filed Wednesday, which states that the diktat recently issued by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services "imposes an unprecedented federal vaccine mandate on nearly every full-time employee, part-time employee, volunteer, and contractor working at a wide range of healthcare facilities receiving Medicaid or Medicare funding." "Unfortunately, with this latest mandate from the Biden...

The White House also warned health care facilities the government will terminate them from Medicare and Medicaid programs as further punishment if they did not comply with the mandate.

Premier Doug Ford did not yield to political pressure to keep a jab requirement in place. Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced that his conservative government will not mandate the experimental COVID-19 vaccines for workers in the province’s healthcare sector. In a statement issued this afternoon, Ford stood in defense of the individual autonomy of healthcare workers in his province by announcing that he will not mandate they receive the jab to keep their jobs despite pleas from the Ontario COVID-19 Advisory Science Table to do so. “This is a complex issue. But when the impact of the potential departure of...

Very brief segment at 1:53 mark on linked video.

U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) visited Stony Brook University on Long Island to highlight the need for more workforce development programs in the medical field. She said the pandemic has been hard on hospitals and other healthcare facilities. In a letter to her congressional colleagues, she wants $67 million in federal funding for healthcare workforce development programs. “They desperately need reinforcements. Staff are physically and emotionally burnt out and hospitals across the entire state have been working with skeleton crews. More than 5 million New Yorkers live in primary care health professional shortage areas,” said Gillibrand. “If we don’t act,...

Despite being promoted as safe and effective by legacy media, many health care workers are refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccines, and those who openly speak out about their concerns get censored by Big Tech companies or kicked off their platforms.Some nurses and doctors are refusing vaccine mandates even if means it will cost them their jobs.The Epoch Times reached out to some of these health care professionals to see why.‘Impossible to Give Fully Informed Consent’Emily Nixon is a registered nurse who has been working in the health industry for 18 years. When her employer, MaineHealth, announced that it would...

Perhaps one of the more perplexing developments during the COVID-19 pandemic has been the display of vaccine hesitancy among some health care workers (HCWs). Because infection preventionists (IPs) often lead vaccination drives at hospitals, they’ve found themselves having to encourage their fellow workers to get the COVID-19 vaccine, and it hasn’t always been an easy job.But just whom among HCWs want to avoid getting the vaccine? Investigators with the University of Illinois at Chicago wanted to address that question and presented their findings in a preprint study in the American Journal of Infection Control (AJIC).“A surprising proportion of vaccine hesitant...

Doctors and nurses should tell their patients to fight climate change, experts have said. Writing in the Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health, they said medics should wield their 'trusted' positions in society to get people to take care of the planet. Academics wrote that health professionals could be 'effective messengers' and help encourage more people to fight climate change.

More than 350 Indonesian doctors and healthcare workers have contracted COVID-19 despite being vaccinated with Sinovac and dozens have been hospitalised, officials said, as concerns rise about the efficacy of some vaccines against more virulent virus variants. Most were asymptomatic and self-isolating at home, said Badai Ismoyo, head of the Kudus district health office in Central Java, but dozens were in hospital with high fevers and declining oxygen saturation levels. Kudus is battling an outbreak believed to be driven by the more transmissible Delta variant which has pushed bed occupancy rates above 90% in the district. Designated as a priority...

March 30, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) – While health officials have been hand-wringing about “vaccine hesitancy” as a leading threat to public health that will prolong the pandemic and blaming “anti-vaxxers” for spreading health “misinformation,” it turns out that it is doctors and nurses who are most reluctant to take a dose of a new COVID-19 vaccine. Just 52% of health-care workers have had at least one COVID vaccine shot though they have been eligible for vaccination since day one of the vaccination campaign in December, a Washington Post and Kaiser Family Foundation poll conducted in late February through March found. Of...

Before she wiped her page on Tuesday, TikTok user hann.brooke95 hadn’t been shy about sharing even the most mundane details of her life with her 19,400 followers. She posted TikToks of herself cooking while breastfeeding, the can of beans she was using for nachos, and even the painstaking process of transferring her license as a pharmacy tech from Florida to Illinois: from filling out the application, to affixing a return address label and stamp on the envelope, to dropping it in the mailbox in front of her house. And the stream of everyday minutiae might have continued if she hadn’t...

A newly released survey found nearly half of health care workers nationwide remain unvaccinated. The survey was done in early March by the Kaiser Family Foundation in partnership with The Washington Post. Among the initial findings, the survey found: Just over half (52%) of front-line health care workers say they have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, leaving 48% who have not. The unvaccinated group of front-line health care workers includes some who either have their vaccination scheduled (3%) or plan to get vaccinated but haven’t scheduled it yet (15%). It also includes 3 in 10 who...

California's health workers are refusing to take the new COVID-19 vaccines - with over half of frontline workers at one hospital unwilling to take it, and between 20% and 50% of workers at other facilities who feel the same, according to the Los Angeles Times.New York nurse Sandra Lindsay becomes the first person in the US to become vaccinatedAt St. Elizabeth Community Hospital in Tehama County, fewer than half of the 700 hospital workers eligible for the vaccine were willing to take the shot when it was first offered. At Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills, one in...

The medical workers will have to take the medicine for seven weeks while contacts of COVID-19 patients will have to take it for three weeks, the circular said, adding that the drug should be given to medical workers with their consent. Health workers involved in the treatment of coronavirus patients will be given hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) tablets as a preventive medication, the Maharashtra government has said and issued guidelines on the use of the drug. State health secretary Pradeep Vyas in a recent circular said the medicine will be given to doctors, nurses and medical staff involved in the treatment of...

VIDEO: Rally at Minnesota state capitol urges nurses to file OSHA complaints over Ebola unpreparednessThe Minnesota Nurses Association (MNA) held a rally and candlelight vigil at the Minnesota Capitol to draw attention to the lack of uniform and adequate safety procedures for dangerous viruses like Ebola at hospitals around the state. Nurses from the Twin Cities, Bemidji and Duluth were joined by members of SEIU Healthcare Minnesota and others. They called on state officials to live up to their responsibility to protect front-line healthcare workers by providing mandates around equipment and training and enforcing existing laws.

The World Health Organization (WHO) says in its latest Ebola report that those dealing with the outbreak in Liberia are so overwhelmed that they cannot keep reliable statistics on its spread. The report also says the high rate of infections across the three countries where it is worst is a cause of "great concern". The report, for the week ended October 5, says the death toll was 3,879 at that date, with 8,033 cases having been reported in Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone and the United States. Another case had since been reported in Spain. "The situation in Guinea,...