IJERPH, Vol. 16, Pages 3981: To Be or Not to Be Vaccinated? The Ethical Aspects of Influenza Vaccination among Healthcare Workers

IJERPH, Vol. 16, Pages 3981: To Be or Not to Be Vaccinated? The Ethical Aspects of Influenza Vaccination among Healthcare Workers International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health doi: 10.3390/ijerph16203981 Authors: Wim Leo Celina Van Hooste Micheline Bekaert Influenza is a highly contagious airborne disease with a significant morbidity and mortality burden. Seasonal influenza (SI) vaccination has been recommended for healthcare workers (HCWs) for many years. Despite many efforts to encourage HCWs to be immunized against influenza, vaccination uptake remains suboptimal. Sometimes there is a significant sign of improvement, only if numerous measures are taken. Is ‘the evidence’ and ‘rationale’ sufficient enough to support mandatory influenza vaccination policies? Most voluntary policies to increase vaccination rates among HCWs have not been very effective. How to close the gap between desired and current vaccination rates? Whether (semi)mandatory policies are justified is an ethical issue. By means of a MEDLINE search, we synthesized the most relevant publications to try to answer these questions. Neither the ‘clinical’ Hippocratic ethics (the Georgetown Mantra: autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice), nor the ‘public health’ ethics frameworks resolve the question completely. Therefore, recently the ‘components of...
Source: International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health - Category: Environmental Health Authors: Tags: Article Source Type: research