Advocate Health Care To Require Vaccinations For All Team Members

FRANKFORT, IL — Advocate Health Care is joining health care providers and organizations across the country by requiring all 75,000 team members in Illinois and Wisconsin to be fully vaccinated for COVID-19 by Oct. 15. Failure to become fully vaccinated without an approved exemption by the deadline will follow the same process as flu vaccine non-compliance and will result in termination.

A decision that underlines safety as the system’s top priority, the mandate applies to Advocate medical centers, hospitals and outpatient clinics in Frankfort and Mokena.

“We are first and foremost a safe, clinical enterprise. Our ultimate duty is to protect the health and safety of our team members, patients and communities,” President and CEO Jim Skogsbergh told team members Wednesday in a video. “The data is overwhelming. This vaccine is safe, and it’s highly effective in preventing infection and, even more so, serious illness and death.”

The decision comes as many care providers and organizations across the country have implemented such a requirement based on conclusive evidence that vaccines are safe, effective and critically important to saving lives and bringing an end to this pandemic.

“While COVID is far from gone, our story is still being written. Let this decision to mandate vaccines be another chapter in our book — one that says we have done everything we can to keep our patients, our communities and each other safe and healthy,” Skogsbergh said.

More than 340 million vaccine doses have been safely administered in the United States. Recent national data shows that nearly all recent COVID-related hospitalizations and deaths have occurred in the unvaccinated population.

The health care system said there would be limited exceptions for specific religious or medical reasons. In addition to doctors, nurses and medical staff, the requirement includes students, volunteers, remote workers and on-site vendors.

Visit Advocate Health Care for a list of more than 350 locations.