 Well, nearly 50 Ascension health employees were fired this week after not complying with a new mandatory flu shot policy. Sarah Winkleman joins us live now from our Brainerd studio with the details. Sarah? Thanks, Dennis. Now flu shot vaccinations are not required for healthcare workers by the state of Minnesota. However, Ascension has decided it's time to make it a requirement for all employees in their facilities. Workers at Ascension say the change in policy came simply because they were not happy with the current number of employees who received a flu shot. We're sitting around that 70 to 80 percent of our workforce and colleagues who were getting immunized and we knew that we could do better than that and that we needed to do better than that if we were going to live our mission. In an effort to reach the 100 percent mark, Ascension gave employees until yesterday to comply with the policy. With an awareness and a focus on patient safety, our flu immunization policy changed from being one asking for a participation alone to actually asking for a vaccination. There were some exceptions for religious or medical reasons, but regardless, all employees still had to get vaccinated or apply for one of the exemptions. Physicians to nurses, to food service, to myself, who works in the office and isn't in direct patient care, as well as our volunteers, our students who are here working alongside of our staff, and then also our vendors who are coming into our facility. Around half of one percent of all employees did not receive the vaccination or have been approved exemption and lost their jobs. We don't have any pockets of employees, it's really individual decisions and conversations and things that they've wrestled through and so no significant pockets of employees and really we're delivering care in our hospitals and clinics just like we would today as we have in the days previous. Throughout the process, Ascension held many communication sessions to help inform employees about why they thought the change was necessary. Based on our focus for improving patient safety and for protecting those that we're caring for, this is really something that we just needed to do as an organization. Now Ascension doesn't have final numbers of what types of employees were fired yesterday, but we do know that all of those 50 employees, they all came from nearly 14,000 employees across four different states. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.