Bitter fights over whether hospitals are doing enough to retain and recruit health care workers have intensified during the pandemic, as shortages reach a crisis point.
The health system’s announcement Thursday follows similar action taken by Henry Ford Health System for workers’ failure to abide by a COVID vaccine mandate. Other hospitals will likely follow suit once federal vaccine rules are finalized.
The Detroit-based hospital system made the numbers public after a deadline passed for staff to get vaccinated. A dozen Michigan health systems were surveyed on staff vaccine rates, offering varying levels of transparency.
Michigan's third COVID-19 surge is "like a runaway train," Dr. Nick Gilpin, Beaumont Health’s medical director of infection prevention and epidemiology, said Thursday.
Health care workers say the fear of an unknown virus and the frantic scramble for equipment of last spring are both gone. But gone, too, are heaps of support. In some instances, staff camaraderie forged in last year’s chaos has started to fracture.
Michigan Medicine, the University of Michigan's Ann Arbor-based health system, announced Thursday it is postponing some surgical procedures because of the crush of COVID-19 patients filling its emergency rooms and hospital beds.
He'd look at me, pleadingly, the reality of the situation dawning anew each time. And then he would wink or mouth the words "I love you" and his eyes would close again.
The massive coronavirus vaccination effort to immunize Michigan's roughly 600,000 health care workers — and eventually the entire population — is in high gear as Pfizer's vaccine candidate undergoes a federal hearing Thursday to review whether it can be safely injected into the arms of millions of Americans.
Those who survive COVID-19 are often left with puzzling and sometimes debilitating conditions months after they are considered recovered from the infectious part of the disease.
Michigan is among eight states nationally that have not released details about the number of children who've died from novel coronavirus since the pandemic began.
Michigan Medicine, Henry Ford and a medical research center based in Farmington Hills are involved in Phase 3 clinical trials to find a safe and effective vaccine for a virus that has killed over 183,000 people in the United States.
Even with federal relief funds intended for providers slammed by COVID-19 patients, some hospitals say they are still shedding jobs to balance their books during the outbreak.
Layoffs and schedule reductions for 1,000 full-time workers or their equivalents will begin this week and continue through the end of July at Trinity Health Michigan, which includes the St. Joseph Mercy Health System and Mercy Health.
