Do hospital employees benefit from the influenza vaccine?

Abstract

Although current guidelines target hospital employees who contact high-risk patients as a high priority for influenza immunization, there are few data to support or refute this recommendation. Therefore, the authors enrolled 179 hospital employees in a randomized double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trial during the 1985-1986 influenza season. Influenza immunization was performed without serious adverse reactions and there was no increase in absenteeism attributable to the vaccination. Among those who developed clinical influenza, there was a trend toward fewer days of illness in the vaccinated group compared with the placebo group (6.0 vs. 8.0, p = 0.07). There were no statistically significant differences between subjects receiving influenza vaccine and those receiving the placebo when comparing incidences of influenza-like illness, severities of illness, and sick absenteeism. Influenza immunization of hospital employees was performed at minimal cost and risk but provided little benefit, most likely because of an unexpected drift of the prevalent influenza strain away from the vaccine type.

Effects of a multi-faceted program to increase influenza vaccine uptake among health care workers in nursing homes: A cluster randomised controlled trial

“…Eighteen met the inclusion criteria [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27] (see Fig. 1).…”

“…Two were of good quality [12,14]. Randomisation methods, blinding and loss-to-follow up were not adequately reported in the third [13].…”

“…Three randomised controlled trials reported the effects of influenza vaccine on HCWs [12][13][14] (Table 3). Two were of good quality [12,14].…”

“…One good study [12] reported a statistically significant reduction in rates of serologically confirmed or clinical influenza, (vaccine efficacy of 88% (95% CI 47%, 97%)) for influenza A. The other two trials reported no difference although in one there was a poor vaccine match [14] and in the other the incidence of influenza was low [13]. A high quality systematic review [28] found that vaccination would reduce absenteeism by about 0.4 (95% CI 0.1-0.8) working days per person vaccinated in healthy adults.…”

Willingness of healthcare workers to accept voluntary stockpiled H5N1 vaccine in advance of pandemic activity

“…Although vaccination of healthcare workers also reduces rates of influenza-related illness and absenteeism among recipients [5,6], seasonal vaccine uptake among healthcare workers in the UK [3,7,8] and elsewhere [7,[9][10][11][12][13] is often low. Barriers to increasing coverage of seasonal influenza vaccination include inconvenience to obtain vaccine, belief that influenza is a mild illness, and concerns over vaccine efficacy or adverse reactions [1,8,9,[12][13][14].…”