DENVER – The University of Colorado’s health system fired 119 employees for not adhering to its vaccine requirement without a religious or medical exemption.
That accounts for less than 0.5% of the company’s 26,500 employees around the state, said UCHealth spokesperson Dan Weaver.
UCHealth employees had until Oct. 1 to be vaccinated against COVID-19 or apply and receive an exemption. Among those fired, 54 employees were from the Denver region, 33 from northern Colorado and 32 from the southern part of the state.
“Despite the loss of these employees, UCHealth’s COVID-19 vaccination requirement has helped to improve staffing. With broad vaccination rates, fewer employees are testing positive for COVID-19 and needing to be out of work while they recover,” Weaver said in an email.
The employees who were fired are welcome and encouraged to reapply if they receive one of the three approved COVID-19 vaccinations, Weaver said.
UCHealth is a nonprofit health care system with 12 hospitals and hundreds of medical clinics in the Rocky Mountain region.
The state of Colorado is requiring hospital workers to be fully vaccinated by Oct. 31. UCHealth set an earlier deadline for itself, which is why it fired employees earlier this week and other hospitals did not.
Mercy Regional Medical Center has not yet released data on how many employees are vaccinated and unvaccinated.
“Mercy Hospital is encouraging its health care providers to receive the COVID-19 vaccination by the October 31 deadline,” said Lindsay Radford, spokeswoman for Centura Health, which owns Mercy. “We believe in caring for each employee as a whole person, which means we are committed to one-on-one conversations to discuss their concerns regarding the vaccine. Because our health care providers still have time to meet the state’s vaccination deadline, we have not terminated any associates as a result of the vaccine mandate.”
