Researchers have suggested that increasing vaccination rates of healthcare personnel substantially improves patient safety, lowering flu deaths by 40 percent.

Healthcare personnel are more likely to be vaccinated if their close contact co-workers, referred to as neighbors in the study, are vaccinated, found Epidemiologists and computer scientists at University of Iowa Health Care.

The researchers constructed a social network of hospital-based healthcare personnel as a proxy for social relationships to examine the impact of co-workers' vaccination status on the vaccine status of their neighbors.

A social network of more than 6,500 healthcare personnel using data was constructed by Donald Curtis, a computer science graduate student, who stripped of personal details to protect privacy, from UIHC's electronic medical record system, including login time and location and vaccination status.

Researchers were able to confirm the level of vaccinated neighbors for each individual, when vaccination data were compared with login information.

It was also found by the researchers that unvaccinated healthcare personnel tended to be more isolated and have fewer vaccinated co-workers. By comparison, vaccinated healthcare personnel tend to have more interactions with co-workers and were more likely to be surrounded by more vaccinated co-workers. (With Inputs from Agencies)