Influenza vaccination coverage among health care personnel during the 2015–16 influenza season, assessed using an opt-in Internet panel survey, was 79.0%, similar to coverage during the 2014–15 season. Coverage was highest among physicians, nurse practitioners/physician assistants, nurses, pharmacists, and health care personnel working in hospital settings. Coverage was lowest among assistants and aides and personnel working in long-term care settings. Employer vaccination requirements and offering vaccination at the workplace at no cost were associated with higher vaccination coverage.

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommends annual influenza vaccination for all health care personnel to reduce influenza-related morbidity and mortality among both health care personnel and their patients (1–4). To estimate influenza vaccination coverage among U.S. health care personnel for the 2015–16 influenza season, CDC conducted an opt-in Internet panel survey of 2,258 health care personnel during March 28–April 14, 2016. Overall, 79.0% of survey participants reported receiving an influenza vaccination during the 2015–16 season, similar to the 77.3% coverage reported for the 2014–15 season (5). Coverage in long-term care settings increased by 5.3 percentage points compared with the previous season. Vaccination coverage continued to be higher among health care personnel working in hospitals (91.2%) and lower among health care personnel working in ambulatory (79.8%) and long-term care settings (69.2%). Coverage continued to be highest among physicians (95.6%) and lowest among assistants and aides (64.1%), and highest overall among health care personnel who were required by their employer to be vaccinated (96.5%). Among health care personnel working in settings where vaccination was neither required, promoted, nor offered onsite, vaccination coverage continued to be low (44.9%). An increased percentage of health care personnel reporting a vaccination requirement or onsite vaccination availability compared with earlier influenza seasons might have contributed to the overall increase in vaccination coverage during the past 6 influenza seasons.

The Internet panel survey was conducted for CDC by Abt Associates, Inc. (Cambridge, Massachusetts) during March 28–April 14, 2016, to provide estimates of influenza vaccination coverage among health care personnel during the 2015–16 influenza season. Similar surveys have been conducted since the 2010–11 influenza season, and survey methodology has been reported previously (5). Health care personnel were recruited from two preexisting national opt-in Internet sources: Medscape, a medical website managed by WebMD Health Professional Network,* and general population Internet panels operated by Survey Sampling International (SSI).† Responses were weighted to the distribution of the U.S. population of health care personnel by occupation, age, sex, race/ethnicity, work setting, and Census region.§ Because the study sample was based on health care personnel from opt-in Internet panels rather than probability samples, no statistical tests were performed (6). A change was considered as an increase or decrease when there was at least a 5-percentage point difference between estimates; estimates with smaller differences were considered similar.

Among the 2,396 health care personnel who started the survey from either source (Medscape or SSI) and had eligible responses to the screening questions, 2,316 (96.7%) completed the survey.¶ Fifty-seven respondents with completed surveys who reported working in “other health care settings” were excluded because examination of their other survey responses indicated that they were either unlikely to have contact with patients or that their work setting was not one of the health care settings of interest for this analysis, and one respondent was excluded because vaccination status was unknown, leaving a final analytic sample of 2,258 health care personnel.

Overall, 79.0% of respondents reported having received an influenza vaccination during the 2015–16 season, an increase of 15.5 percentage points compared with the 2010–11 season estimate, but similar to the 77.3% coverage estimate reported in the 2014–15 season (Figure) (Table 1). Coverage continued to be highest among physicians (95.6%) and lowest among assistants and aides (64.1%) (Figure). Among vaccinated health care personnel, 72.7% were vaccinated at their workplace.

Coverage among health care personnel working in long-term care settings increased from 63.9% in the 2014–15 season to 69.2% in the 2015–16 season; for all other work settings, coverage in the 2015–16 season was similar to coverage in the 2014–15 season (Figure) (Table 1). Although influenza vaccination coverage has increased in all work settings since the 2011–12 season, health care providers in long-term care settings have consistently had lower coverage than health care personnel working in hospital and ambulatory care settings (Figure).

During the 2015–16 influenza season, vaccination coverage was 96.5% among health care personnel working in settings where vaccination was required (Table 2). Overall, 37.8% of surveyed health care personnel were required to be vaccinated against influenza, similar to the percentages in the 2013–14 and 2014–15 seasons. Sixty-one percent of health care personnel working in hospitals had requirements for influenza vaccination, which is at least 27 percentage points more than the proportion in any other work setting. By occupation, physicians (51.0%), nurses (49.8%), and other clinical personnel (47.4%) reported the highest prevalences of influenza vaccination requirements in the 2015–16 season, and assistants and aides reported the lowest requirement prevalence of influenza vaccination requirements (22.5%, data not shown).

Among health care personnel whose employers did not have a requirement for vaccination, coverage was higher among personnel who worked in locations where vaccination was available at the worksite at no cost for >1 day (82.8%) or 1 day (82.1%) than among personnel who worked in locations where their employer did not provide influenza vaccination onsite at no cost but actively promoted vaccination through other mechanisms** (67.8%). Vaccination coverage was lowest (44.9%) among health care personnel working in locations where employers neither required vaccination, provided vaccination onsite at no cost, nor promoted vaccination (Table 2). Health care personnel working in ambulatory, long-term care, and other clinical settings more frequently reported that their employer neither required, provided, nor promoted vaccination (20.6%, 27.7%, and 32.1%, respectively), than did personnel working in hospital settings, where only 2.3% reported that their employer neither required, provided, nor promoted vaccination (Table 2).