Brief report
A mandatory campaign to vaccinate health care workers against pertussis

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Pertussis is a highly contagious respiratory infection that has dramatically increased in recent decades and has caused outbreaks in health care facilities. Because of these trends, we implemented a mandatory pertussis (Tdap) employee vaccination program. Final vaccination compliance was 97.8% across all clinical campuses.

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Methods

The Geisinger Health System (GHS) employed 15,267 HCWs during fiscal year 2010-2011. At that time, GHS had 2 major tertiary care hospitals: Geisinger Medical Center (GMC) and Geisinger Wyoming Valley Hospital (GWV) with 726 combined licensed beds. Both are affiliates of Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine and Thomas Jefferson Medical College. GHS also has multiple ambulatory care practice sites and surgery centers extending across 31 counties.

A voluntary immunization campaign occurred

Results

In June 2009, only 9% of HCWs were vaccinated across the health system (Table 1). This included only 9% in the high-risk clinical areas and 11% to 12% in other clinical areas. After the initial voluntary campaign, high-risk areas achieved 50% compliance, but other clinical areas remained low at 20% to 29% compliance.

After completion of all phases of the campaign, 13,479 or 90% of personnel were vaccinated (Table 2). Of those, 11,071 (or 97.8%) of those who worked in clinical buildings were

Discussion

Over the past 30 years, pertussis has been increasing in incidence. Reasons may include lack of life-long immunity from natural infection or childhood vaccination, as well as lack of timely diagnosis and treatment because of nonspecific symptoms.8, 13 Within health systems, up to 90% of infection practitioners have reported HCW exposures to pertussis, placing susceptible patients and other HCWs at risk for the disease.14 It is reasonable for hospitals to consider more proactive positions.15

GHS

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    Thirteen were excluded because they do not evaluate Tdap coverage in HCWs. Thus, 28 studies were included in the analysis (Fig. 1) [8–35]. The first two studies evaluating Tdap coverage among HCWs were published in 2008, in France [21,25].

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    We theorized that these factors might also account for the poor uptake of Tdap vaccine in our institution. Interventions to improve vaccination rates in hospital settings have focused, with variable success, on mitigating obstacles to vaccination and/or instituting mandatory vaccination policies [17–20]. This quality improvement project was conducted to determine whether HCP compliance with recommendations for pertussis vaccination (Tdap vaccine) could be improved by education and changes in vaccination processes.

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Conflicts of interest: None to report.

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