The Florida Senior Living Association just released the results from a member survey on COVID-19 Vaccination Practices with interesting results:

• 29.5% require or intend to require residents to be vaccinated;
• 50% require or intend to require staff to be vaccinated;
• 31.8% require or intend to require 3rd party contractors to be vaccinated; and
• 13.6% require or intend to require visitors to be vaccinated.
• While assisted living facilities (ALFs) estimated 10-15% of staff would resign rather than be vaccinated, results generally ranged from no staff to 6% of staff.

Most interesting to us is that half of respondents intend to require staff to get vaccinated to continue employment. As has been widely reported in the media, senior housing staff have lagged in vaccination rates, which poses a risk to residents but puts operators between a rock and a hard place.

On one side, you have unvaccinated employees posing a risk of passing on Covid or one of its variants to residents. On the other hand, if you mandate vaccination and lose staff, then you risk undermining the quality of resident care due to staffing shortages. As with most thigs in life, there do not seem to be any easy answers.

Looking on the bright side, only a small percentage of staff (10-15% or less) are anticipated to resign rather than be vaccinated. This may make the choice to require vaccination a little easier.

Kudos to our friends at the Florida Senior Living Association for making the effort to poll members and provide this useful data.