Protecting Patients: Study Shows That Johns Hopkins Flu Vaccination Rates Are Twice the National Average.

(From AScribe)

BALTIMORE -- A campaign that makes seasonal flu vaccinations for hospital staff free, convenient, ubiquitous and hard to ignore succeeds fairly well in moving care providers closer to a state of "herd" immunity and protecting patients from possible infection transmitted by health care workers, according to results of a survey at The Johns Hopkins Hospital.

In a report published in the Feb. 1 edition of the journal Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, researchers say the rate of seasonal flu vaccination for the 2008-2009 season among health care workers at the Johns Hopkins East Baltimore medical campus, including The Johns Hopkins Hospital, was double the national average. They attribute the results to a persistent campaign that made it easy to get vaccinated and also to the wider availability of free community-based vaccination opportunities.

The 2008 survey, conducted by the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine's Division of Occupational Medicine, showed that 71.3 percent of the 10,763 hospital staff, …