Hi Craig,

Great question. Take heart! Getting to 95% is indeed possible even without a mandatory program. The pertinent USNWR reporting measure for healthcare worker vaccination is how many of each category of personnel have ever received a Tdap vaccine. They aren’t asking for boosters, but there is a separate measure for offering Tdap boosters to families and caregivers. That’s great because all you need is one documented dose of Tdap.

Here are some tips from my years working on the USNWR reporting for my institutions.

• Ensure that Tdap is documented at onboarding for everyone, and offer it if they don’t have documentation. Most employees will provide their full vaccine record to OHS.
• Be sure staff don’t neglect to document the Tdap, even though it may not be mandatory and they may not be planning to work in pediatrics. However allied health personnel may later transfer into pediatrics, and you’ll later be glad you got that Tdap done.
• Reach out periodically to everyone in the target group for whom you don’t have a Tdap on file.
• Partner with practice leaders in pediatrics and get THEM to raise awareness and encourage people to pay attention to communications from OHS.
• Well in advance of the USNWR submission deadline, start sending the pediatric practice leaders a report of their Tdap vaccination rate. If it’s not at 95%, they will be motivated to support your outreach efforts. Also there will be no surprises when they get the final numbers for the application.

Dear All,

I am wondering if you have any special programs in place to promote Pertussis (Tdap) boosters for staff working in Children's and Neonatal HCFs?

U.S. News and World Report encourages ranked hospitals to achieve a vaccination rate of 95% which might be impossible given that most hospitals do not mandate it.

If you could share your best practices about this, I would appreciate that very much.

Thank you.    

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