News & Media
Vaccination Incentives and Patient/Customer Inquiries Regarding Staff Vaccination Status
Q: We haven’t mandated vaccination in our practice, but we are strongly encouraging it. I have two questions that have come up lately though. The first is, can we incentivize our staff to get vaccinated? I was thinking we could offer a cash payment or something along those lines, but I don’t know what the rules are. The second question I have is in regards the response we should give when a patient asks if all of our staff are vaccinated. I don’t want to lie to them, but I also don’t want to jeopardize the privacy of our staffs’ healthcare decisions. Can you shed a little light on both of these issues?
A: Questions like these have become the next phase of vaccination implementation. Employers across the state continue to urge voluntary compliance and in light of the Governor’s recently announced vaccination thresholds, we all have reason to encourage large scale participation. One of the ways practices are attempting to increase vaccination rates in their offices is by offering an incentive program. The recently updated Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA) allows for participating employers to offer paid time off for employees to receive the vaccine and for any potential recovery period needed afterwards. If you are participating with FFCRA, the wages you pay out through a program like this would be 100% refunded through a federal payroll tax credit. If you are not participating FFCRA currently, you could still choose to offer a similar PTO program for vaccination compliance and pay for those hours out of your own pocket.
Employers can also provide cash incentives to employees who receive the vaccine. However, if you elect to provide a financial incentive, you have to decide how much to offer. Offer too little and it’s ineffective. Offer too much and it could be considered, ‘coercive’ and in violation of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) policies. While an exact amount has not been published, many employers who have implemented a similar program have offered $75-100. Cash payments in exchange for meeting specifically defined criteria – in this instance, getting vaccinated – could qualify the incentive as a nondiscretionary bonus and have implications on overtime calculations under the Fair Labor Standards Act. So, when you compare a cash incentive to a paid time off option, the time off may be worth more to the employee and have less strings attached for you.
Implementation is another consideration for you. From your question, it sounds like you have a portion of your staff that chose to be vaccinated early on, before you considered offering an incentive. If you choose to change the rules now, will you make the incentive retroactive and apply it to those who have already been inoculated? If you go the route of offering paid time off, you could easily add a predefined number of hours to each vaccinated employee’s vacation bank; regardless of whether or not they used work time to get vaccinated.
Employers who decide against offering an incentive plan can still maintain a safe and healthy workplace through the mitigation measures outlined in your COVID-19 Preparedness and Response Plan, I.e. the use of health screening questions, social distancing, mask wearing, sanitation protocols, air purifiers, closed waiting rooms, pre-procedure COVID testing, etc. This brings me to your second question. While you can’t control whether or not an employee will choose to get vaccinated, you can control the safety procedures you implement and enforce in your practice setting. These measures have helped you prevent the spread of COVID in the workplace and it’s important to point that out when a patient asks about the vaccination status of your team. I think a good response to a question like that is, “As a practice we have strongly encouraged vaccination, but have not mandated it. [All/Most/Some] of our staff have chosen to receive the vaccine voluntarily, but we do have a percentage that have not for various reasons – some of which may be related to pre-existing health conditions and/or religious beliefs. That information is confidential, so I am not at liberty to provide names. What I can tell you is that we take patient and employee safety very seriously and the mitigation efforts we have been using since last year have been extremely effective at preventing the spread of COVID in our practice. We believe this will continue to be the case going forward regardless of vaccination status.”
HELPFUL ARTICLES/LINKS:
- Vaccination Incentives and Patient/Customer Inquiries Regarding Staff Vaccination Status (HRM Article)
- Considerations for Employers Contemplating Incentive Programs to Encourage Employees to Receive the COVID-19 Vaccine(National Law Review Article)
- Employer Covid-19 Vaccine Incentives—A Difficult Dilemma(Bloomberg Law Article)