CEO: University Hospital staff 'weary' of COVID but wary of vaccine mandate

University Hospital is seeing its beds fill with COVID-19 patients but the hospital is not considering a mandate for employees to get vaccinated at this time, CEO Jim Davis said. 

At its hospital board meeting Thursday, Davis said the hospital had 128 COVID-19 inpatients, four more just since that morning. It is already well beyond where it was a year ago when there was a summer surge, he said. Last week, the hospital had 100 admissions from COVID-19, compared to 90 a week at the peak of last summer, Davis said.

"We've exceeded last year's July 4th surge for admissions," he said. That is still well below the winter wave, when the hospital was seeing 124 COVID-19 admissions a week, But the current surge is sending more COVID-19 patients to the Emergency Department to be treated as well, Davis said.

More:University Hospital facing staff shortage as COVID-19 increases

"We've got a lot of activity in [that department] as well as folks upstairs" in the hospital, he said. 

But University is facing a staffing shortage and doesn't have the personnel to reopen University Hospital Summerville's COVID-19 units, which took many of the inpatients during the highest surge in January and February. 

"This isn’t just us, it’s everywhere" among hospitals, Davis said. "And it’s not just nurses either." Hospitals are desperately looking for respiratory therapists, physicians, even lab technicians, he said.

"Everybody is in short supply," Davis said. University got a lot of support from the state during the winter but that has not been the case this time around, although the health system has been promised 30 nurses.

"We hope we get that," he said.

Many of the employees have had it with another surge of COVID-19, Davis said.

"Staff are growing weary of treating COVID," he said. "When a 28-year-old dies in your Intensive Care, that’s different. It’s different than a 95-year-old dying in your Intensive Care. They’re also very frustrated with treating people who haven’t been vaccinated. For crying out loud, get vaccinated. Help our caregivers out."

But there is another labor issue also looming overheard – staff who are concerned about being mandated to take the COVID-19 vaccine, Davis said. At least 54% of staff are fully vaccinated, but others have said they are but haven't yet supplied the documentation, so the rate may be slightly higher, spokeswoman Rebecca Sylvester said.

"A lot of our contract employees are not vaccinated, for whatever reason," Davis said. And even though there is no mandate to take it, that hasn't kept some people from protesting, he said.

"I’ve gotten some pretty nasty letters," Davis said. "Even though we have not mandated it, I’m getting beat up because I might. We just don’t see us mandating."

University might consider an approach Delta Air Lines took, which was to charge the unvaccinated more for health insurance, he said.

If University implemented a vaccine mandate, "[I] stand a pretty good change of losing 20-30% of my employees and I can’t do that right now," Davis said.

Doctors Hospital of Augusta would not provide its employee vaccination numbers but spokesman Kaden Jacobs shared a statement, "We encourage our colleagues to get the vaccine and we make it available to them. It is not mandatory."

AU Health System has 62% of its employees vaccinated, including 96% of its physicians and residents, spokeswoman Lisa Kaylor said. But it does not have a mandate. The health system held an employee vaccination clinic on Thursday, where some staff such as nurse Leslie Slantis were getting a third shot of Pfizer vaccine as a booster. Though she normally works at Children's Hospital of Georgia, she has been helping out with the adult clinic where patients are receiving monoclonal antibody therapy to treat COVID-19 and hopefully prevent hospitalization.

"The majority of the people we had were unvaccinated," she said.

Many of those receiving vaccine from Employee Health nurse Phyllis Hallman were getting boosters.

"But we've had quite a few first shots," Hallman said.