Physicians and Clinicians Should Be Required to Get Flu Shots: Ethicist

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Hi. I'm Art Caplan. I'm at the Division of Medical Ethics at New York University's Grossman School of Medicine, where I'm the director.

It's flu season, yet again. For many parts of the country, we're already in the thick of it, and for other places, we're going to have flu outbreaks continuing and intensifying. I've long believed that every healthcare institution — nursing homes, hospitals, clinics, home care, hospice — should require flu shots for all doctors and all nurses because it is the easiest, cheapest, and most ethical way to protect the workforce from flu, who you need to be in there when flu outbreaks take place, and to protect patients against getting the flu when they come in to hospital settings and get exposed to healthcare workers who may have the flu already but don't know it.

In a recent Medscape pollI was happy to see that the majority of physicians surveyed agreed with me: 65% said they supported mandatory flu vaccination in hospitals and only 23% said they did not. I think flu vaccination is something that has already been shown to be useful and important, not only in stopping people from getting the flu but also in making sure that they don't get as sick when they get the flu.