Vaccine Mandate: Letter to the Board
Fall 2021: unvaccinated staff facing termination appeal to their hospital board
In August of 2021, Gundersen Health System announced a Covid vaccine mandate for their unvaccinated staff. Over the next several months, debate took place internally and publicly. As a registered nurse facing termination, I authored the following letter to the hospital’s Board of Trustees.
9/2/2021
To: Gundersen Health System Board of Trustees
The decision to mandate the Covid vaccine has caused widespread distress throughout Gundersen Health System. There are staff throughout the organization, both vaccinated and not, that are shaken and demoralized.
Employees who do not want the vaccine are painted as if they do not care for their patients, colleagues, or community. This has emboldened other staff in hostility against unvaccinated patients and coworkers. Dedicated staff who have accumulated countless hours of outstanding patient care feel slandered and bullied. How does forcing out hundreds more staff during a crisis help Gundersen serve the community? The vaccine mandate is leading to widespread and unnecessary suffering.
Our Employee Compact has the noble goal to create “an inclusive environment of respect where people feel valued and recognized.” The vaccine mandate does the opposite. It undermines a person’s ability to make individual healthcare decisions. It forces dedicated, caring, and experienced staff to choose between a career they love and a vaccine they don’t want. The mandate openly undermines the patient-provider relationship and is antithetical to our core value of individualized patient care.
The hard-line stance to take the mandate “up to and including termination” is coercive. It is more heavy-handed than our federal institutions, other healthcare providers, and the companies making the vaccines. It puts breadwinners in the position of having to choose between a vaccine they don’t want and feeding their family. It shamefully ignores our core value of informed consent.
The Employee Compact also says “we build trust through open, honest communication that respects different views and ideas.” The current leadership culture at Gundersen fails to uphold this value. Being polarized does not make Gundersen stronger. The mandate has created a hostile and toxic work environment for many people. For staff to continue practicing “love + medicine,” we first need to see it emulated from our leadership.
The failure to publicly recognize the protection of natural immunity and provide transparency about breakthrough infections erodes any claim that this is a science-based decision that protects patients and staff. We have fully vaccinated, infected, and contagious staff working with vulnerable patients, while those protected by natural immunity but unvaccinated are portrayed as villains. Staff would like to see leadership return to holding up evidence-based practice as a core value.
Dr. Rathgaber, you have asked us to value diversity, equity, and inclusion. We do. We would like to see the same from you. We hope you take time to reflect on these words. This is your opportunity to lead by example. From this point of turmoil, there is still much good that can be preserved. Gundersen’s staff, patients, and community need you to take ownership of this difficult situation and steer things in a different direction. Please allow all mandate exemptions without challenge. We recognize the heavy burden of leading through a pandemic, and sincerely thank you for getting us this far together. Help us continue to serve our patients skillfully, proudly, and unified.
Sincerely,
Hundreds of your staff, individually excellent, and similarly distressed
In a Leadership Town Hall on 9/13/2021, Gundersen CEO Scott Rathgaber acknowledged that the vaccine mandate would result in a reduction of services to the community:
Q: “What is the plan to help departments that could potentially lose 25% of their staff due to the refusal of the vaccine?”
A: “Hear me say that if we have to decrease the ability to deliver services in order to preserve the staff that we have, we will do so in the short term until we can build that back up… If we do have staffing shortages, we will have to adjust ultimately what services we can provide… It’s as simple as math, and having enough people to do the work.”
One can read about the ensuing staffing crisis here.
Now, a year and a half later, staffing has still not recovered, and the community suffers from the decrease in services.
It is long overdue for our healthcare institutions to remove agenda-driven leadership and return to the core values of informed consent, individualized care, and the doctor-patient relationship.