PROVIDENCE —Rhode Island’s state-run hospital is planning to allow unvaccinated health care workers to work for up to 30 days beyond Friday’s deadline for the state’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate.
Eleanor Slater Hospital, with campuses in Burrillville and Cranston, will allow unvaccinated staff to work in that limited time frame if they’re deemed essential, but will plan to replace them with vaccinated staff. The hospital leadership considers all of the workers there essential, they said at a town hall meeting Thursday. They said unvaccinated workers should expect to receive letters by the end of the business day identifying them that way so they can report to work Friday.
That will allow them to continue to work, although they’ll still have to wear N95-type masks and get tested for COVID-19 regularly. The state will also continue to try to persuade them to get the safe and effective COVID-19 shots, which is the overarching goal.
It wasn’t clear how many unvaccinated workers the state would allow past the deadline, but the hospital will use new wiggle room that was rolled out last week amid concerns about a staffing crunch. The hospital, as well as the state Veterans Home, will be on a corrective action plan with regard to the vaccine mandate, Governor Dan McKee said Thursday.
McKee said the new enforcement policy that allows some health care workers to work if they’re unvaccinated was not a backtrack from the initial plan.
“You’ve got to be responding based on where you are at the moment,” McKee said at a news conference in Warwick.
As of Wednesday, the state-run Rhode Island Veterans Home had 16 unvaccinated health care employees, said spokeswoman Meghan Connelly. They had a Pfizer vaccine clinic on site Wednesday and are trying to get everyone vaccinated; more people were reporting their vaccine status throughout the day, Connelly said.
The nursing home is trying to avoid having to go into contingency planning that would involve having unvaccinated staff working beyond the deadline, but “we’re prepared to do so if necessary,” Connelly said.
The state Department of Health in August set out the Oct. 1 deadline for the COVID-19 vaccine mandate. The regulation says that state-licensed health care facilities have to prohibit unvaccinated workers from entering the facility once the deadline hits. There’s a medical exemption, but no religious exemption and no exemption to get tested regularly instead of getting vaccinated, one of the toughest such measures in the country.
But last week, the state said unvaccinated workers could work beyond that Friday deadline if, in their absence, there would be a risk to quality of care. The move came after some facilities said the mandate would worsen their staffing problems, and the state took pains to emphasize that enforcement, including action against professional licenses, would still start Friday. And the state Department of Health said facilities would have 30 days to replace unvaccinated health care workers with vaccinated ones. After 30 days, enforcement would ramp up.
“We want to, as part of our enforcement, allow for making sure that no disruption to patient care occurs, and facilities are able to achieve the full compliance we expect from Day 1 in a way that maintains patient care, stability and no disruption along the way,” said Dr. Nicole Alexander-Scott, the director of the Department of Health, at a news conference Thursday.
Few facilities are expected to need to use that new wiggle room — the state’s largest acute-care hospital systems have said that they will not allow unvaccinated workers to work beyond Friday — but Eleanor Slater Hospital is among those that is planning to do so. The majority of facilities will be fully in compliance as of Friday, health officials said.
As of Thursday, 88 percent of the health care workers at Eleanor Slater Hospital were vaccinated, according to the Department of Behavioral Healthcare, Developmental Disabilities and Hospitals, which runs the state hospital system. That number has ticked up considerably in the past months. Randal Edgar, the spokesman for BHDDH, could not immediately confirm what the policy would be for unvaccinated workers, but it was unveiled to workers at a town hall Thursday.
The Veterans Home is the state-run nursing home for aging vets in the state. Eleanor Slater Hospital’s roughly 200 patients have a variety of complex medical and psychiatric needs.
Brian Amaral can be reached at brian.amaral@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @bamaral44.
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